Innovation Blog

Cookie-Cutter Innovation – AVOID IT!

By Shlomo Maital

 

   

Ford Focus

 The Dec. 1 Financial Times reports on “a drive to Lego-land” among car companies – standardizing car production worldwide, in the face of eroding prices and slumping margins and demand, in order to cut costs.  It notes that when Sergio Marchionne became FIAT CEO in 2004, he was startled to find that Fiat’s only two midsized cars, the Fiat Stilo and the Alfa Romeo 147, did not have even one single screw in common. 

   According to FT, the new Ford Focus, Ford’s flagship car, led by highly-esteemed CEO Alan Mulally, will go on sale next year in Europe and in North America, and will have 80 percent of its parts in common, whether built in Michigan, St. Petersburg or Chongqing (China).

    Great idea?

    It contains the seeds of the next car-industry crisis.

    When you standardize production, for cost-cutting, you also standardize beauty, aesthetics, style, jazz, appeal, excitement. GM did this.  They destroyed powerful brands, because Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Chevvies, Pontiacs, all began to look the same – DULL!   When the cookie-cutter accountants take over, the great designers who love beautiful exciting cars leave. 

     Innovators, if you have an exciting product, why not make it LOOK exciting?   Why not spend a bit more and make it look like it is,  new and pathbreaking!   One can say, well, the Ford Focus can look jazzy on the OUTSIDE but it can be standardized on the inside.  No way.  Cars have to be beautiful, jazzy, exciting, INSIDE, not just OUTSIDE, and they need to be unique, otherwise, might as well buy a Toyota as a Ford.    So beware, global-car cookie-cutter producers.  You may just cost-cut the heart out of your product.