It’s official: the “Way Forward” for Ford Motor Co. includes massive job cuts, painful plant closings and an unprecedented retrenching as the automaker tries to figure out the brave new world of manufacturing and selling automobiles. Over the next six years, the company plans to slash up to 34,000 jobs in North America and shutter 14 factories. That’s nearly 25% of the company’s entire workforce! As the Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday, “The question now is whether the painful cuts at Detroit’s struggling giants are the beginning of a new, more competitive era, or just the beginning of the end.”

So… despite all the talk from the Ford executive suite about “innovation” being a key to the future, does it really all just come down to job cuts and a pledge to figure it all out later, once the bleeding stops…?

Maybe not. Jeff Thurston of the Vector One blog has posted some interesting observations about ways that Ford can still innovate its way out of the current mess:

“The future of the car is changing and innovation may mean a re-think about transportation systems and mobility products and services… Has a new door opened? A car is much more than wheels alone. A whole ‘Infotainment’ industry is arising alongside the car industry, an industry that see’s the automobile as something different than simply wheels. Today the Internet encircles cities through WiFi connections. Students tap into communications through wireless phones and devices and roads are becoming more electronic oriented. Routing and directions are monitored via satellite and other transportation networks, like air and rail, all impact and interface roads and meeting points. Pricing pressures are also affecting car use, along with taxes and so on.

The car is changing. It is no longer a solitary mode of transportation, but depends on and is connected to other networks - often digital in nature. It will be interesting to see what Ford means by ‘innovation’.”

Tags: Ford innovation

[image: Ari-Pekka via Flickr]

Last Friday in the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley’s “Science Journal” column featured a great example of how collaboration in the medical sciences can yield breakthrough innovations. Acting on a tip from a colleague, a molecular geneticist may now be on the path to discovering a cure for multiple sclerosis years before anyone thought it was possible. The key to biomedical collaboration, says Sharon, is getting scientists and clinical investigators to talk to each other. Corporations can also apply this same kind of logic - getting departments that normally don’t talk to each other to share data and perspectives on the overall business. The director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital explains how a lack of collaboration has slowed down progress in the biomedical field:

“Basic scientists and clinical investigators haven’t had enough to do with each other. The resulting bench-to-bedside block has been of great concern throughout academic medicine. But now we’re starting to see things that hopefully will overcome it…”

A Stanford neurologist agrees:

“There are so many biomedical discoveries, but we’re not converting enough of them into treatments. We haven’t taught researchers enough about human diseases. They know about mice and worms, but not about people.”

With this in mind, Mass General is holding a meeting this month to discuss how to increase interactions between basic and clinical investigators. Then, later this year, Stanford University will launch a master’s of science in medicine program, training Ph.D. students in bench-to-bedside research.

Tags: collaboration innovation

[image: Science Museum, U.K.]

The Accelerating Innovation blog has posted highlights of a recent tour of an innovation lab by U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez: Commerce Secretary Tours Rockford’s EIGERLab. The EIGERLab is a next-generation R&D lab for the manufacturing industry located in Rockford, Illinois that collaborates with partners such as the University of Illinois and Northwestern University. As noted on the Accelerating Innovation blog, the U.S. government appears to be most interested in innovation projects that lead to tangible results and commercial products:

“Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez took a whirlwind tour of Rockford’s EIGERlab on Monday, January 16, 2006 and proclaimed it is a great example of innovation and competition. He seemed most concerned about the commercial viability of the projects under way. Commercialization — moving pure research projects to the marketplace — is the ultimate standard by which the federal government can evaluate its $4 million investment in the EIGERlab, Gutierrez said. “It really is about jobs and tangible outcomes,” he said. “How many new businesses have been created because of the investments? What has it done for the creation of jobs? Ultimately, you have to have something you can sell.”

At the end of the posting, there’s a link to an EIGERLab PowerPoint presentation for Mr. Gutierrez and other high-level guests: The National Innovation System and Regional Hot Spots. There’s a lot of great information embedded in the presentation: a graphic showing the evolution of innovation networks, a top-level view of the National Innovation Act, a chart showing the projected innovation superpowers of 2050, and a collaboration taxonomy from Don Tapscott.