Innovations

Open Source Brings Collective Creativity To The Intelligent Edge

The idea of open source is not new. Ideas around the power of collectives to share, iterate, and effectively innovate together in near virtual space arose in the mid-eighteenth century, during the heyday of the age of enlightenment, with groups like the Lunar Society in the UK. The Lunar Society met roughly once a month in Birmingham, at the epicenter of the industrial revolution, as a collective of great minds, including both of Charles Darwin’s grandfathers.

They explored, shared, and broke barriers across disciplines together because they had the space in which to do it, and as a byproduct they gained great energy from discovering the possibilities of the world around them. For anyone who has attended an open source event, this description may sound familiar.

The Lunar Society of the 1790s is in many ways the very essence of open source community. Getting the very best ideas, working together, reacting and sharing together in real time. One major difference, though, is that the Lunar Society was very exclusive by nature, while today’s open source community is not. It is truly open. We live in a vastly more complex and expansive world than Birmingham in the 1790s; the power of the opportunities today is global, and mostly still forming.

With billions of devices running autonomously, computing, sensing, and predicting zettabytes of data, there are endless possibilities for what business ideas and technologies will thrive on the intelligent edge. Only an open source strategy can work in this environment: millions of people, ten of millions of ideas, maybe billions of combinations of code.

Open source for the intelligent edge

An effective intelligent edge will require a robust infrastructure that can handle low latency, high availability, and bandwidth demands. This infrastructure will include three key components: a cloud platform for running applications, analytics to monitor the health of the platform and services, and an orchestration layer to deploy and manage services across a distributed network.

There are five basic ways for companies to obtain this infrastructure: build it themselves from scratch, buy a proprietary solution from a vendor, build it starting with open source, buy a vendor-supported open source solution, or use infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

In a recent survey we administered across 500 respondents in France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the U.S., a relatively small percentage selected “build your own from scratch,” and a few more selected “vendor proprietary.” The majority selected an option where open source plays a role, whether in IaaS, do-it-yourself (DIY), or vendor-supported options. IaaS was the #1 choice for all three elements (cloud platform, analytics, and orchestration). The rest were split between one of the other flavors of open source (DIY or vendor-supported).

It seems most people aren’t interested in building and/or managing their infrastructure themselves. 34% of business in the U.S. cite “lack of internal skills or knowledge” and “bandwidth constraints on people’s time” as the biggest barriers to adopting intelligent edge technologies, followed closely by “additional investments in associated technologies are unclear” and “lack of internal business support or request.” Open source options give these companies the benefits of the solution without having to shoulder the burden all on their own.

If building and supporting your own infrastructure is core to your business, then building from scratch might make sense — but even then, chances are you may still use open source components. With 180,000 open source projects available with 1,400 unique licenses, it just doesn’t make sense not to use open source to some degree.

Two key reasons why open source is so pervasive

The popularity of open source is not surprising. For one thing, you get to tap into a technological hive mind. There is some debate, and many variables, but estimates put the number of open source developers worldwide somewhere north of 20 million. Open source communities attract a wide variety of people who are interested in participating in a particular piece of technology, with communities and projects running the gamut in terms of size and scope, depending on the focus and maturity of the project.

The common thread is the community of people who are contributing and reviewing code in an effort to make the project better. Generally speaking, the more applicable the code is to a variety of use cases and needs, the more participation you might see in the community. So with open source projects you get to leverage some of the smartest people on the planet, and they don’t have to be on your company payroll.

The second reason for such widespread usage of open source — related to the first — is the fact that you don’t have to do it all yourself. It’s a pretty common scenario for a development organization to use open source code as a component of a larger solution. By leveraging that open source component they can save hundreds if not thousands of work hours by not having to develop or be the sole maintainer of that piece of code. It also allows the organization to focus on their value-add.

Not just a groovy codefest

Open source derives its success from community, and just like in any community, some boundaries and agreed-upon rules to play by are necessary in order to thrive. It’s one thing to download a piece of open source code for use in a personal project. It’s another to use open source code as a critical component of your company’s operations or as a product you provide to your customers. Just because you can get open source code “for free” doesn’t mean you won’t make an investment.

Open source projects need focus, attention, and nurturing. In order to get the full value from the community one must be an active member of that community — or pay someone to be an active member of the community on your behalf. Being active requires an investment of time and resources to give a voice and listen to other voices on a steering committee, discuss priority features to work on next, participate in marketing activities designed to encourage more participants, contribute quality code, review code from others, and more. Leaning in is strongly encouraged.

Open source technology offers a tremendous opportunity for collective creativity and innovation. When like-minded people gather together for a focused intellectual purpose, it’s energizing to the individual and can be hugely beneficial to the organization. Whether the open source code is part of an IaaS, a component of something you build, or part of a vendor-supported solution, it is a tremendous asset you can use to push your company’s value-add forward to better meet your customer’s needs.

Matt Jones VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL ENGINEERING

Matt Jones is responsible for the global R&D team at Wind River. In this role, he leads the delivery of innovative products that are enabling and accelerating the digital transformation of our customers across market segments, ranging from aerospace to industrial, defense to medical, and networking to automotive. With nearly 20 years of experience in the technology industry, he oversees the development of the Wind River portfolio to expand the company’s reach in both new and existing markets.

He was previously at Virgin Hyperloop One, where as Senior Vice President he led the Software Engineering teams; tasked with providing all the software needed to manage, control, and operate an autonomous hyperloop system. This included embedded software and electronics, networking, cloud data and services, as well as customer-facing applications. Prior to Virgin Hyperloop One, he was chief product officer at moovel Group, Daimler’s mobility solutions company. Before moovel, he was director of future technology at Jaguar Land Rover. He also serves as Chairman at GENIVI Alliance, and was a member of the Board of Directors at The Linux Foundation.

He holds a Master of Engineering, Electronic and Electrical with Management, from the University of Birmingham.

Source: Open Source Brings Collective Creativity To The Intelligent Edge

Critics:

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. It most commonly refers to the open-source model, in which open-source software or other products are released under an open-source license as part of the open-source-software movement. Use of the term originated with software, but has expanded beyond the software sector to cover other open content and forms of open collaboration.

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use for any (including commercial) purpose, or modification from its original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort, where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community. Code is released under the terms of a software license. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version (fork) back to the community.

Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product’s design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint. Before the phrase open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of other terms. Open source gained hold in part due to the rise of the Internet. The open-source software movement arose to clarify copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues.

List of free and open-source software packages

Open-source license, a copyright license that makes the source code available with a product
- The Open Source Definition, as used by the Open Source Initiative for open source software
Open-source model, a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration
Open-source software, software which permits the use and modification of its source code
History of free and open-source software
Open-source software advocacy
Open-source software development
Open-source-software movement
Open-source video games
- List of open-source video games
Business models for open-source software
Comparison of open-source and closed-source software
Diversity in open-source software
MapGuide Open Source, a web-based map-making platform to develop and deploy web mapping applications and geospatial web services (not to be confused with OpenStreetMap (OSM), a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world).

Agriculture, economy, manufacturing and production

Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT), is designed for environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, economic, and community aspects
Open-design movement, development of physical products, machines and systems via publicly shared design information, including free and open-source software and open-source hardware, among many others:
- Open Architecture Network, improving global living conditions through innovative sustainable design
- OpenCores, a community developing digital electronic open-source hardware
- Open Design Alliance, develops Teigha, a software development platform to create engineering applications including CAD software
- Open Hardware and Design Alliance (OHANDA), sharing open hardware and designs via free online services
- Open Source Ecology (OSE), a network of farmers, engineers, architects and supporters striving to manufacture the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS)
- OpenStructures (OSP), a modular construction model where everyone designs on the basis of one shared geometrical OS grid
Open manufacturing or “Open Production” or “Design Global, Manufacture Local”, a new socioeconomic production model to openly and collaboratively produce and distribute physical objects
Open-source architecture (OSArc), emerging procedures in imagination and formation of virtual and real spaces within an inclusive universal infrastructure
Open-source cola, cola soft drinks made to open-sourced recipes
Open-source hardware, or open hardware, computer hardware, such as microprocessors, that is designed in the same fashion as open source software
- List of open-source hardware projects
Open-source product development (OSPD), collaborative product and process openness of open-source hardware for any interested participants
Open-source robotics, physical artifacts of the subject are offered by the open design movement
Open Source Seed Initiative, open source varieties of crop seeds, as an alternative to patent-protected seeds sold by large agriculture companies.

What Sustainable Innovation Might Look Like in 2021

The saying “hindsight is 20/20” will take on a new meaning following this year. Without doubt, we are collectively facing some of the biggest challenges the world has seen. The pandemic’s second wave is taking lives and livelihoods across Europe, healthcare systems are collapsing under the strain, and the destructive effects of climate change are being felt across our planet.

There is reason for optimism though: The speed in which a series of promising Covid vaccines have emerged shows what can be achieved when organisations across the globe put their collective weight behind a shared mission. But if we seek to return to how life was before, we have failed not just future generations, but those living today, too.

As we move toward 2021 we are at a crossroads, and if we don’t act now, it might be too late to solve the health and climate emergencies we face. We need to deliver impactful, sustainable, and meaningful innovations. Without them, we will soon run out of road. But what does sustainable innovation look like in 2021 and beyond?

Rethinking innovation.

People are increasingly looking to entrepreneurs to drive the changes the planet needs. Two-thirds of researchers and academics believe tech entrepreneurs will make a bigger contribution to solving social challenges in the years to come than governments in Europe, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech report.

That’s a huge responsibility. But passion, drive, and creativity alone are not enough to make this a reality. To tackle these challenges we need to fundamentally rethink approaches to innovation, business models, and the relationship between entrepreneurs and corporate organizations.

Time and time again, startups and entrepreneurs come undone when they try to scale up their transformative ideas into a sustainable and impactful business model. Why? Because they lack the necessary muscle (in terms of finance and resources) and networks (to navigate legislative and regulatory requirements).

Corporate enterprises have a lot of the ingredients necessary to drive innovation and deliver real impact. They have the assets, resources, and networks. But they often have the wrong corporate governance structure in place, limited board involvement in the innovation process and are missing the talent needed to not just conceive, but to execute and scale digital business ideas successfully as well.

Too often, corporate resources are focussed on tools to create innovation, like incubators and accelerators. These are fine for driving new value through product and service innovation, but do not deliver the transformative change and new business models that are needed in 2021 and beyond.

To achieve this, we need to shift our collective thinking on to which investment types create the right framework for innovations to scale and become sustainable. The true transformative power lies in moving beyond building new products and services, and towards creating new sustainable, impactful and digital business models. It is only by changing the way we innovate that we can begin to tackle the major issues of climate and health.

Corporate Venture Building: A potent solution.

That’s why in 2021, we will see corporations increasingly team up with top entrepreneurs to collaborate and drive a new wave of sustainable innovation. This approach, which enables both parties to harness their relative strengths and create new digital business models is called Corporate Venture Building (CVB).

CVB is a new asset class, designed to tackle the problems that occur in highly regulated and complex markets like health or climate. It helps corporations to effectively rethink and redeploy existing assets and capabilities to fundamentally transform its business model and create long-lasting, positive and impactful change.

That is what CleanTech startup Solytic set out to achieve when it was co-created and scaled together with Swedish multinational energy giant, Vattenfall, using the CVB approach. Solytic puts an end to the waste caused by the inefficiency of solar PV systems and maximizes its overall performance, by combining unused resources with the needs of service providers.

By identifying and eliminating sources of error and optimizing utilization, Solytic increases the efficiency of solar PV systems by up to 30 percent. The benefit it delivers means within two years of its creation, the startup has expanded into 60 countries and has connected over 100,000 solar plants to its AI monitoring platform.

Invest $500 to get $2500 in a week completely legit & Real

Solytic has only been able to achieve this scale and impact within the highly regulated energy industry, because it used the CVB model and drew on the resources and knowhow that Vattenfall has been able to provide. Moreover, it has demonstrated that by rethinking innovation and combining the entrepreneurial spirit with the resources and existing assets of an established corporation, creating new digital business models that have a real impact is possible.

For many people, and many reasons, 2020 has been a year to forget. But it’s important we learn from this shared experience, and recognize what can be achieved when we embrace digital technologies and collaborate effectively. In the whole of human history there has never been a more urgent need for sustainable innovation, and by changing our mindset and approach, we can deliver it in 2021, and beyond.

By: Felix Staeritz Entrepreneur Leadership Network VIP

American Marketing Association

Disposable packaging and items keep the spread of COVID-19 to a minimum. But brands who place eco-friendliness front-and-center are struggling to keep their mission right now. The American Marketing Association’s Steve Heisler and Sarah Steimer break down the process by which companies can maintain their sustainability efforts. Check out our special COVID-19 zine! Marketing News coverage in a bite-sized PDF. Download here: https://www.ama.org/2020/05/04/market…

With Toyota’s Help, This Secretive Entrepreneur May Finally Give Us Flying Cars

^JoeBen Bevirt first thought about building an airplane that could take off and land like a helicopter in second grade while trudging up the 4.5-mile road to his family’s home in an off-grid hippie settlement among the redwoods in Northern California. “It was a lonnnnng hill,” Bevirt says, laughing. “It made me dream about a better way.”

Four decades later, Bevirt is closing in on that goal. On a ranch outside Santa Cruz, the surfing mecca near where he grew up, Bevirt has secretively developed an electric airplane with six tilting propellers that he says can carry a pilot and four passengers 150 miles at up to 200 miles per hour, while being quiet enough to disappear among the hum of city life. He envisions the as-yet-unnamed aircraft, which experts speculate could cost $400,000 to $1.5 million to manufacture, as the foundation for a massive rooftop-to-rooftop air-taxi network—one he plans to build and run himself. His aspiration is to free urbanites from snarled roads and save a billion people an hour a day at the same price (he hopes) as an UberX ride, or roughly $2.50 a mile.

It sounds crazy, but Bevirt, 47, has some powerful believers. Toyota pumped roughly $400 million into his Joby Aviation in January, joining investors including Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group, the latter of which was also an early Tesla backer. In all, Joby has raised $745 million, most recently at a valuation of $2.6 billion. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda told Bevirt he hopes, through Joby, to realize the flying-car dreams of his grandfather Kiichiro, Toyota Motors’ founder, who developed aircraft before World War II. Toyota engineers are refining components of Joby’s aircraft to make it easier to build on a mass scale more akin to the auto industry than aviation, and helping Bevirt set up a factory in Monterey County where he plans to produce thousands of aircraft a year.

Joby is the best-funded and most valuable of an explosion of startups leveraging advances in batteries and electric motors to try to wean aviation off fossil fuels and create new types of aircraft, including autonomous ones, to serve as air taxis. No one knows how big the industry could get—or if it will get off the ground at all—but Wall Street is spitballing some big numbers. One report from Morgan Stanley estimates the category could generate $674 billion a year in fares worldwide by 2040.

“If we can fly, we can turn our streets into parks and fundamentally make our cities much nicer places to live in,” Bevirt says.

Dreamers have been trying (and failing) to build flying cars for 100 years. Skeptics think Joby and its competitors are still at least a decade too early: Today’s best batteries pack 14 times less usable energy by weight than jet fuel. Given how much brute power is needed to propel an aircraft straight up, they say, until batteries improve, electric air taxis will have too little range and carrying capacity to make business sense. Then there’s the tough task of convincing regulators they’ll be safe to fly.

Bevirt says he can produce a viable, safe aircraft now with top-of-the-line lithium-ion battery cells that currently power electric cars. And Joby is the only startup to commit to Uber’s ambitious timeline of launching an urban air-taxi service in 2023. Bevirt says he’s on track to win safety certification from the Federal Aviation Administration that year, which would likely make Joby the first electric air-taxi maker to clear that daunting hurdle.

Bevirt was raised in a back-to-the-land community in which he got an early education in engineering, helping fix farm equipment and building homes alongside his father, Ron Bevirt, who was one of the LSD-tripping Merry Pranksters back in the 1960s. (JoeBen is named after a character in Sometimes a Great Notion, written by Pranksters ringleader Ken Kesey, famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

As an adult, Bevirt re-created that community with a decidedly capitalistic twist on his secluded 440 acres of woodlands and meadows overlooking the Pacific. The sprawling property, which he purchased with the proceeds from selling earlier businesses—Velocity11, which built liquid-handling robots used for testing potential drugs, and the company behind GorillaPod, a flexible camera tripod—includes a former quarry where Bevirt conducted early test flights. Employees have lived in small cottages on the property and built houses nearby. Before locking in on developing an aircraft, he incubated other startups there, with everyone working together in a cavernous barn. Bevirt started an organic farm to feed them, with chickens and bees yielding eggs and honey.

The environment bred a tight-knit team – some Joby Aviation staffers start their day surfing together and end it with pizza parties around an outdoor oven. Group meetings are punctuated by choruses of “woots.”

“It’s a high-fiving, hugging culture, and that really flows from JoeBen,” says Jim Adler, managing director at Toyota AI Ventures, who convinced his colleagues to invest in Joby in 2017. “He’s high-energy, and it’s contagious.”

While Joby is participating in Uber’s aerial ride-sharing plans, a big part of Bevirt’s business model involves running his own ride-sharing network. That helped attract investors. “If it was just a vehicle, I would not have been moved to invest if there wasn’t a service wrapped around it,” Adler says.

Building the required landing pads, booking software and other infrastructure, though, will require a lot more cash—and patience—from investors. Joby has no plans to sell its aircraft outside of building its own fleet, further delaying the day when investors can recoup the billions that will likely be needed to scale up.

Joby’s five-seat design boosts its revenue potential for ride sharing compared to the smaller, more mechanically simple two-seat multicopters being developed by Germany’s Volocopter and China’s EHang. The downside of Joby’s size: weight. A big part of that heft comes from the batteries, and it’s unclear if they’ll have enough juice to do the job, according to modeling by the lab of Carnegie Mellon battery expert Venkat Viswanathan, based on aircraft specs Bevirt shared with Forbes.

For Joby to achieve the 150-mile range it says the 4,800-pound gross weight aircraft is capable of (but has yet to achieve in flight testing), plus FAA-required reserves, Viswanathan’s team estimates it needs a 2,200-pound battery pack. Subtracting 1,000 pounds for five passengers leaves only 1,600 pounds for the airframe, seats and avionics—a slim 33% of gross weight. That’s 35% lower than any certified production airplane. The upshot: Either Joby has built an unprecedentedly light and efficient airframe, as Bevirt maintains, or its range will turn out to be lower. (For more details on Joby’s batteries, click here.) Another concern: Getting approval from the FAA might require safety tweaks that weigh it down.

“What we’re doing, it’s an insanely hard undertaking,” Bevirt says. “Not only the technical challenge of the aircraft [but] then changing the way everyone on Earth moves around on a daily basis.”

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Get Forbes’ daily top headlines straight to your inbox for news on the world’s most important entrepreneurs and superstars, expert career advice, and success secrets.Jeremy Bogaisky

I help direct our coverage of autos, energy and manufacturing, and write about aerospace and defense. Send tips to jbogaisky[at]forbes.com

Get Forbes’ daily top headlines straight to your inbox for news on the world’s most important entrepreneurs and superstars, expert career advice, and success secrets.Jeremy Bogaisky

I help direct our coverage of autos, energy and manufacturing, and write about aerospace and defense. Send tips to jbogaisky[at]forbes.com

Jeremy Bogaisky

I help direct our coverage of autos, energy and manufacturing, and write about aerospace and defense. Send tips to jbogaisky[at]forbes.com

Santa Cruz Works

JoeBen Bevirt from Joby Aviation at The Second Annual – Titans of Tech on Jan. 25, 2018. http://santacruzworks.org http://www.jobyaviation.com Filmed by Bitframe Media – https://www.bitframemedia.com

We Will Share Our Vaccine with the World Inside the Chinese Biotech Firm Leading the Fight Against COVID-19

It was the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, and not Al Pacino in The Godfather Part 2, who first said, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Yin Weidong, the CEO of Chinese biotech firm SinoVac, seems to have taken that advice to heart.

On the desk in his office in Beijing are two plastic models of a virus—each blue core surrounded by red protein spikes. From the time it started spreading in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late December, containing that virus has occupied virtually every waking moment for the scientist.

The pandemic we now know as COVID-19 is rampaging across every continent. On the dozens of daily infection charts, broken down by nation and pasted floor to ceiling on Yin’s office wall, the numbers tell a horrifying story: 16 million infections and 640,000 deaths worldwide, including 146,000 American lives lost as of Monday.

But if the enemy is close, so is a possible new friend. Yin’s desk is now also home to several small glass vials of SinoVac’s COVID-19 vaccine—dubbed CoronaVac—that began phase 3 trials involving 9,000 volunteers in Brazil last week. (A phase 1 trial involves small groups of patients to check a vaccine for negative side effects, and a phase two trial usually tests for a combination of safety and efficacy, while a phase 3 trial is like a phase 2 but involving many more participants.)

Normally, getting from pathogen identification through phase 3 trials in about 10 years is considered quick. The mumps vaccine is generally considered the fastest ever developed at four years. But if all goes well, CoronaVac might be ready for regulatory approval early next year. Not that Yin is satisfied.

“Do you really think this is fast? Compared with the spread of the virus, it’s not fast enough,” he says, holding his plastic nemesis aloft with grudging respect. “That is how we should measure our progress.”

During the 2002 to 2003 SARS outbreak, which claimed over 774 lives worldwide, SinoVac was the only firm to go into phase 1 vaccine trials, but the pandemic suddenly disappeared. That meant that research was discontinued at a huge loss for the firm. It wasn’t entirely wasted, however. Now, 17 years later, SinoVac is able to build on that earlier work, given that COVID-19 is very similar to SARS. It and coronavirus are “like brothers,” says Yin.

Still, creating an effective vaccine is just a third of the battle. The other two prongs of vaccine development are production capacity and getting regulatory approval. At present, every nation’s FDA equivalent would need to approve CoronaVac independently, though given the unprecedented need, there are conversations about streamlining.

“The virus doesn’t require a passport but the vaccine needs to be licensed by every country,” says Yin.

SinoVac CEO Yin Weidong in his Beijing office on Tuesday, July 21, 2020.

Charlie Campbell

SinoVac is aiming to triple current capacity to produce 300 million doses per year. That might sound impressive, but accessibility is likely to be a big issue. Given that at least two doses will be required to immunize one person, it would still take almost a decade to vaccinate every person in China alone, never mind sharing the vaccine with the world’s 7.6 billion people.

“If only one or two countries get protected this won’t solve the problem and get economic activity back to normal” Yin says.

SinoVac isn’t the only company with a potential vaccine in clinical evaluation. There are over 20 companies around the world engaged in the task with more than 130 vaccines in development, according to the WHO. But given the scale of the need, there’s going to be no quick fix to the pandemic.

Another vaccine candidate, developed by U.S. biotech firm Moderna with the National Institutes of Health, provoked the desired immune response in a test of 45 individuals, and is about to enter phase 3 trials. It functions by introducing an mRNA sequence—a molecule that tells cells what to build—coded for a disease-specific antigen. Once produced within the body, the antigen is logged by the immune system, empowering it to fight the real virus.

But while such RNA vaccines, as they’re known, have multiple benefits—including speed of production—they must be stored at sub-zero temperatures. That means their distribution to far-flung populations is problematic. While SinoVac initially experimented with RNA and other vaccine prototypes, they found that a traditional inactivated virus vaccine produced the best results. Under normal conditions, Yin believes CoronaVac has a shelf life of three years.

“The purpose of this work is not to discover which technology is better,” says Yin. “The purpose is to control the disease.”

In principle, SinoVac is a private company that owns CoronaVac as its licensed intellectual property, meaning where the vaccine is distributed should be a purely commercial decision. However, the Chinese government has contributed to the estimated one billion renminbi (about $140 million) the firm is investing in CoronaVac. This and other contributions from international NGOs currently under negotiation all come with distribution commitments attached.

In a speech to the World Health Assembly on May 18, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to make a COVID-19 vaccine produced in China a “global public good.” In reality, of course, every queue has someone at the back, meaning there will be much jostling for priority—and potentially boosting Beijing’s global clout.

According to Benjamin N. Gedan, a former regional director on the White House’s National Security Council now with the Wilson Center, “If China produces the first coronavirus vaccine at scale, it would be an extraordinary diplomatic tool anywhere in the world.”

SinoVac has already committed to sharing 60-100 million doses in Brazil through a collaboration with São Paulo-based Instituto Butantan, which is performing the phase 3 study. In Asia, the firm is “actively in discussion with several countries,” says Yin, including Indonesia and Turkey, and is exploring options in Europe. It has also had more than 30 meetings with the WHO to update the global health body on its progress.

“We will share our vaccine with the world,” says Yin.

By Charlie Campbell / Beijing

3 Things Coca-Cola, AWS And Smartsheet Taught Me About Innovation

uncaptioned image — In today’s market, companies that are not constantly evolving or changing go extinct very quickly. Back in 1950, the average age of a company on the S&P 500 was 60 years old; today, it’s 20. With so many companies failing, disappearing, or getting consolidated, transformation is critical for businesses seeking to survive, let alone compete and win.

To be successful in product innovation, start with the customer and work backwards to determine the products you need to design and build.Smartsheet

Some companies are really good at transformation and continuous innovation; disruption is built into their DNA. Others struggle with their legacies of success, becoming overly focused on self preservation, which leads to slow decision making and aversion to risk.

But it’s not impossible for large companies to reinvent their business; indeed, it’s essential for their survival. During the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate to work at three amazing companies — all very different — each of which has been integral in transforming their industry.

Through these experiences, I learned important lessons about innovation and business transformation that can be applied to almost any company. Here are three critical keys to success:

1. Start with the customer

To be successful in product innovation, start with the customer and work backwards to determine the products you need to design and build. Only by truly understanding your customers can you deliver products that they will love.

When I worked on Coca-Cola^Ⓡ Freestyle, we knew we had to start with the consumer and figure out what they wanted, so we did a ton of research. We started with focus groups in five different cities, five groups per city, all different age groups and demographics. The insights we gathered in these sessions informed our quantitative research, in which we ultimately talked to more than 7,000 consumers.

By truly understanding consumer preferences, we were able to build the Coca-Cola Freestyle in a way that appealed to consumers, with striking results: Installing a Freestyle machine led to increased beverage sales for restaurants by 17- 20 percent, and increased Coca-Cola sales volume by 30-40 percent in those locations. What’s more, about 25 percent of consumers who knew about Freestyle told us that they chose which restaurant they went to based on whether it had a Freestyle machine!

To innovate at Smartsheet, we set out to understand what problems our customers are trying to solve and then build solutions that help them do that. Smartsheet is a cloud-based work-execution platform that makes it easy for anyone to get work done without having to wire together a bunch of other tools. Today, most of the companies chasing this market overestimate the technical bar that most business users can clear, which results in overly complex products that are not easy for most business users to adopt. At Smartsheet, we really focus on how we can meet the needs of the average business user.

Every time we build a new product, we start by writing a document called a “PR/FAQ” (Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions”), which outlines what we’re going to build — and why — before we actually go to code (an exercise I brought with me from Amazon.) This means we create the story that we want to tell customers on the day the product launches — before we actually build anything. Then, we iterate on the press release until we like what it says about the product and how it solves a problem for the customer. We validate it with existing customers. Only when we’re satisfied that what we have is the right product definition do we begin work on building the proposed product.

2. Small independent teams move faster

Once you determine what to build based on research and customer feedback, assign a small team to the project and empower them to make decisions and innovate. Keeping the team small and focused helps prevent scope creep and eliminates the management overhead required to coordinate work across a large group. It is important to establish mechanisms for the team to escalate when they need help, but try to limit the amount of energy the team has to expend reporting up. This will speed innovation.

To develop Coca-Cola Freestyle, I built a small dedicated team that was completely isolated from the rest of the organization. We reported to a board of advisors on a quarterly basis but were empowered to make decisions without having to ask for permission.This was pretty game-changing, as it allowed us to move fast, experiment and learn, and be singularly focused on capturing the opportunity we saw in the market.

Coke’s idea of isolating a small, scrappy team to work on product innovation is the Amazon model as well. In fact, Amazon has a name for it: a “two-pizza team.” Almost every new service that starts at Amazon starts with a two-pizza team — a team small enough to feed with two pizzas.

Small, scrappy teams can help you make better decisions by forcing you to make trade-offs based on the constraints faced by the team. They’re better able to innovate quickly and course correct as needed to keep the project on track.

3. Take a long view

Another key to supporting innovation is to take a long view of the business. Rather than expecting an immediate return on an innovative new idea, focus on how you’ll develop the product to best serve your target market.

At Amazon, they take a very long view of the business. When we launched a service at Amazon, no one was pushing us with the question: How fast can you get to profitability? Instead, the discussion was framed around:

● What’s the market you’re going after?

● How much of the market do you think you can serve with the MVP (Minimum Viable Product — the first, solid foray to market)?

● Where do you think you’d go after that?

Rather than worry about getting a very quick return on investment, the idea is that if we build meaningful, compelling products, we’ll figure out how to make money over the long term.

At Smartsheet, we not only take a long view of our business, but also encourage our customers to do the same. For example, when customers come to us for a solution, we try to understand the problem they are trying to solve or the pain point they want our help to address. This deep understanding enables us to build solutions that are both opinionated and flexible. We bring best practices to the table, along with a real point of view on ways that our customers can change how they work, and how we can help their businesses innovate faster as they navigate a constantly changing market — now, and into the future.

Gene Farrell Brand Contributor

Source: 3 Things Coca-Cola, AWS And Smartsheet Taught Me About Innovation

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