The nearling called Lightyear One
Am I in love? Well, I must at least admit that my heart spontaneously started beating faster when I first saw the advertisement of this beautiful car. Strange, because everyone who knows me could hardly call me a petrolhead. Or perhaps that’s exactly the reason why: there is no question, no trace, no dirty smell of ‘petrol’ here at all.
Fascinated, I look at the image of the Lightyear One and can’t resist clicking on the photo that sends me directly to the website. “Always charging in the sun. Longest range. Most sustainable.”Yes, I’m in love. Because this is no ordinary car. Not even an ordinary electric car. This is an electric car that — through solar panels — charges itself. Wow! The idea is not revolutionary though: for years, engineering students have been designing solar panel powered cars that compete against each other for the largest autonomous driving range. But hey, today all those crazy experiments have led to something tangible, I realize. And that’s what makes me so very happy. After all, creativity is the result of searching, failing, reconsidering, starting over, and refining until the result becomes something ‘useful’ in the broadest sense of the word.
I continue discovering the website: “Lightyear is not an ordinary car manufacturer. We are a tech company on a mission: to create clean mobility for everyone.”Talking about a mission statement, this one can count! Clean mobility for everyone! Gosh, I would like to have it printed on a T-shirt to proudly walk through the entire city. So now I have become very curious and want to know how affordable this piece of technology ‘for everyone’ really is. Oh, here’s a button that indicates ‘Reserve One’… Click!
€ 149.000,-. That’s the price you pay for clean mobility of the future. Or if you don’t have that amount of money on your bank account, you can also choose to lease it for € 1.879,- per month. A noble way to spend your full salary.
My friend and colleague Cyriel Kortleven has come up with a beautiful word which he uses in many of his creativity keynotes: a ‘nearling’. He defines it as ‘a positive word for something new that was done with the right intentions, which has not — yet — led to the right result.’ Dear Lightyear people, you have created a perfect nearling. Such a brilliant piece of state-of-the-art technology, so beautifully designed, so teasingly marketed… but unfortunately so financially out of everyone’s reach! Sorry, silly me, not ‘everyone’ of course. I forgot the happy 1%.
People, planet, profit. Three words that — at least to me — are inextricably intertwined when it comes to creativity that leads to innovation. And ‘people’ does not stand for ‘the happy 1%’. That’s too easy. Lightyear’s profit model contains the ‘planet’ part for sure. Even in a superb way. I guess we can’t imagine the time and effort those engineers have spent to design this striking vehicle stuffed with advanced green technology. Bravo for that, truly! But please don’t leave the ‘people’ part out. Take your creativity to a higher level to make it also an affordable piece of innovation for many people.
Easier said than done? For sure, but it’s not impossible. Perhaps it all starts with a different point of view. After all, creativity is about making life better. And that’s exactly what drives frugal innovation. It’s the kind of innovation you find in areas dismissed for years: mainly the ‘poor’ countries in the Global South or so-called ‘emerging markets’. Scarcity of means, money, and know-how — or sometimes extreme circumstances like hunger or war — forces people to make the most of what’s at hand. No highly educated engineers, no exceedingly expensive test labs and certainly no predator investors trying to make money fast. It’s about ordinary people without any formal education, with the street as their R&D lab, who try to create a better life for their community with very limited resources.
In his book ‘Frugal Innovation: How to do more with less’, Navi Radjou gives many examples. What would you make of a fridge made out of clay, that uses no electricity, and still manages to keep fruits and vegetables fresh for days? Mansukh Prajapati, the Indian designer, is not driven by profit, and has but one goal: ‘I wanted to make a product that poor people could afford and that is not harmful to the environment.’This device is offered for less than €40. And how about the ingenuity of the next innovation: a billboard that takes water from the air and turns it into drinking water. In Lima, Peru, where despite high humidity the climate is characterized by long periods of draught, this innovation is a godsend. The billboard can generate approximately 90 liters of drinking water per day.
And there are so much more examples and cases to discover. Instead of assuming that frugal innovation only applies to certain groups of consumers, it may be smarter to see it in the light of what economists call ‘high elasticity of demand’. This is most certainly the case when it is about products where, by crossing a particular threshold, a price cut will lead to a strong rise in demand. Clean mobility — and the particular example of Lightyear One here above — could be a wonderful target.
All nice, you will think, but how do you start? You cannot expect highly skilled engineers and professional Western business people to suddenly get a frugal mindset. Familiarizing yourself with a certain way of thinking takes time and also to master the necessary skills and mechanisms that are specific to frugal innovation must be taught. A nice creative technique that specifically responds to this is The Frugalizor. This technique is based on twelve underlying mechanisms of frugal innovation and by examining your product or service against each of these mechanisms, you come up with useful ideas on how you can make it more available to a larger audience with more limited resources. An exercise that — in the case of Lightyear One — could certainly mean a first step in the right direction.
Let us strive for innovation that is not elitist, for creativity that benefits everyone. This is my plea. It requires time and a mindset that is not purely focused on profit. We live in a world that is moving fast and is also becoming more and more connected. Taking care of each other — and in particular of those who are struggling socially and financially — must become a natural reflex for everyone who is committed to creativity and innovation.
