Following the Thread: Automotive Industry

Time to embark on another journey and explore the automotive industry innovation landscape. I focus first on manufacturing sectors, since they represent the last mile at the very end of our globally interconnected industrial setup, before goods are used and consumed in our modern economy. There is a reason for this. As I have argued all along, innovations primarily emerge to seize opportunities or solve challenges that affect living standards. Human ingenuity is first devoted to increasing abundance. Transformations thus emerge from the consumer side, through consumers’ ability to access existing services in a more convenient way or at a fraction of their past cost, or to access new services that have not been invented yet. And as these transformations materialize, their effects are felt all along the value chains that supply these services, all the way up to resource extraction and production. Failing to apprehend these changes leads to misinterpretations of upcoming evolutions and poor forecasting (see also Petit, 2021). In a world now poised to decarbonize at a rapid pace in order to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change in the long run, I find it pretty terrifying that we define pathways that overlook these transformations. Indeed, several may in fact accelerate and benefit from the transition toward a zero-carbon economy, while others could drag the whole effort down. This is why we need to first comprehend these changes in order to prepare for them more rationally…