It’s time to caffeinate, and while you’re pouring yourself a delicious cup of dark roast, think about two quotes. One is from Ernest Hemingway in answer to the question, “how do you go bankrupt?” “Two ways,” was Papa’s reply, “gradually then suddenly.”
The other quote comes by way of a paraphrase, but its originator was a researcher and futurist and “coiner” of Amara’s Law, Roy Charles Amara. His law states:
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
Now, three of Fast Company editors’ top-five-ranked picks for 2017’s World’s Most Innovative Companies–Amazon, Google, and Apple–are, arguably, zeroing their strategic sights on transforming how people live in their homes. We’d rank Tesla Motors right up there with them.
For the most part, their activities to date focus on homes’ systems and interfaces, not the building envelope per se. Nevertheless, they’re very much part of housing’s ecosystem, having entered it from the fringes but now squarely positioned to impact its future.
Their businesses and business models, their respective equal emphasis, not only on executing what they do today but on inventing what they’ll be doing tomorrow is, well, different from home development and construction firms.
Look farther down the rankings of Fast Company‘s top-50 Innovative Companies, and you’ll see a peppering of firms who are or are becoming household names in housing: Airbnb, Vivint Smart Home, The Home Depot, Related Companies.
Here’s proof that while we tend to associate the term innovation with Silicon Valley, it’s happening in the salt-of-the-earth sticks-and-bricks and all-real-estate-is-local real world as well.
Drill into the “by-sector” listings in Fast Company‘s innovators list, and you’ll see the names of companies we believe will be household names in housing some day, maybe sooner than we think: iRobot, DJI, Universal Robots, Osterhout Design Group, Nvidia, SoundHound, etc.
Innovation does not exclude enterprises sheerly because of their operational models, or business models, or capital structures, or their size, or their customer base. It’s an option for any firm or any individual who chooses to be an innovator.
That’s not to say innovation comes without cost, without uncertain returns on efforts, without failure(s). Still, it is an open invitation to anyone or any organization who recognizes that to excel is no longer enough. To excel and transform seems like a lot to ask operators to do. It’s a bit like the notion of “more, better, faster”, or “more with less.” It feels impossible to accomplish, but necessary to demand.
For innovators, the notion of impossible is a distortion of reality. Their innovations make the impossible real, and in the real, messy, granular universe of real estate, construction, marketing, etc. that is home building and development, the impossible needs to become real. Otherwise, real needs go unmet.
We discovered as we worked on developing our 2016 Hive event and hiveforhousing.com that housing is rife with bright spots of innovation and innovators, many of whose projects, from light-bulb moment to bootstraps funding, to pilot, to roll-out, are happening at “the fringes” of mainstream, for-sale, production housing.
We’re working to build Hiveforhousing.com into housing’s epicenter for business, operations, design, and engineering transformation, and we have the pleasure to be working on our Hive 50, which will honor housing’s most innovative people and organizations as part of our 2017 Hive event, Dec. 6-7 at the brand new InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown.
And, while we’ve got you thinking about innovation, pour yourself another half-cup, and have a look at one measure–the number of new registered patents, from howmuch.net–of the bright spots in innovation, both domestically and globally.
How many of them, do you suppose, will impact how people buy, or live in, or sell or rent their homes?
