The latest Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, has opened and is breaking box office records, with over $200 m. in revenue grossed so far. It is the largest gross for a movie opening in history.
  
What can innovators learn from Batman and its director Chris Nolan?

* Break the rules. Batman is a ‘comic book’ movie. Movies in this genre have a formula. They have villains, but the villains are not that villainous, because viewers want to be amused and entertained, not frightened.  Nolan broke the rules. His comic-book movie raises real issues of ethics (can you break the law in order to enforce it?). His villain, The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, is truly unredeemably evil. Comic-book movies usually do not win Oscars. The Dark Knight may just break this tradition. Nolan was unafraid to make a serious movie out of a genre that previously has not been at all serious.

* Be like Bizet, not like Henry Ford. Bizet wrote the opera Carmen. Carmen was a rule-breaker, a game changer. Before Carmen, there was Comic Opera, and there was Grand Opera. Bizet combined them.  Audiences were puzzled and booed. But in the end, they got the idea. Carmen became one of the world’s best-loved operas – though Bizet did live long enough to see this happen. The Dark Knight may also have become a game-changer, and we may see more comic-book movies that treat serious issues and that make people think. 

The Ford Motor Co. is celebrating the 100th birthday of the Model T, first developed by Henry Ford in 1908.   The Model T was a smashing business innovation, of a kind that made competitors irrelevant, in Gary Hamel’s phrase. After Henry Ford invented the assembly line, no other business model for car production could compete with it. Ford changed the rules of the game, not only for cars but for all manufactured products. Ford’s business innovation made Ford the dominant car-maker for 20 years, until 1928. In that year, a business genius named Alfred Sloan introduced another game-changing innovation: Cars with different colors, styles, engines, and with closed bodies (the Model T was open). Henry Ford missed the boat. He failed to change his business model in time to meet competitive threats. Ford went downhill until 1965. And today, the company he founded is losing massive amounts of money and its existence is threatened, as is General Motors – the company Sloan founded. Both Ford and GM have lost the innovative talents of their founders. They have forgotten their core values. They have forgotten their history. They no longer make beautiful cars. They are no longer run by executives who live, eat, sleep and dream cars. And they certainly do not seek game-changing innovations, as Batman’s Chris Nolan does. Instead they pursue cost-cutting strategies, and those never ever sustain marketplace success by themselves.

And the rest, as they say,  is history.