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February 24, 2005

Air Taxis and Convergence

Ester Dyson's latest seminar is called Flight School:
"Our goal is to get the pioneers in space and aviation together to trade ideas and opportunities as you build and transform your market. "

One thing that caught my eye in the promo email was about air taxis.

"...The second transformation is the on-demand air taxi business – a marker so new it doesn’t have a simple name yet. Air taxis carrying just one to five people can operate competitively and profitably – or so their proponents claim. They will require an interacting combination of cheaper, more reliable aircraft and business models based on real time schedule, price and customer-preference optimization. All three of these developments are coinciding, and should result in a new market that changes not just aviation but on-the-ground business and living patterns."

Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, talks about the confluence of component technologies that eventually allowed the DC-3 Dakota to take off, from both a technology/aerodymics perspective and from a business model perspective. It's going to interesting to see the evolution of an air taxi business go through the motions.

Senge makes the point that when engineers come up with a new idea that works in the laboratory they call it an invention.

But what the engineer seeks to create is an innovation. An idea that works in the laboratory does not become an innovation until it can be replicated reliably on a meaningful scale at practical costs.

In engineering when an idea progresses from an invention to an innovation, it requires that diverse, “component technologies” come together.

Senge uses the development of the DC-3 to illustrate this.

He notes that the thirty years between the Wright Brothers' first powered flight and the development of commercial air travel were marked by a myriad of failed experiments.

"The early planes were not reliable and cost effective on an appropriate scale... The DC-3, for the first time, brought together five critical component technologies that formed a successful ensemble.

They were: the variable-pitch propeller, retractable landing gear, a type of light-weight molded body construction called 'monocoque,' radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps.

To succeed, the DC-3 needed all five; four were not enough."

Additionally, he notes that it also took the development of radar, airports and commercial airtravel business models to launch the air travel industry (and it related eco-systems).

Some food for thought about what technologies lying around the lab now can blindside you later?

Posted by sdehaast at February 24, 2005 10:22 AM Posted to food for thought