From SNL – “Talking to Putin “is like being cornered at a party by a guy who just started CrossFit.”” I was/am that guy.
CrossFit entered my life two years ago while working as an advisor with The Startup Factory to a health metrics company that was focused on the space. If you are working as an adviser, then you should at least understand the market. It turned out to be very enjoyable and create great results, primarily because I am cheap and somewhat lazy – two things that aren’t often discussed in regards to that mode of exercise.
Lazy or Delegating?
Having someone else figure out your exercise programming is great. No need to open a book or do any research. Don’t spend time thinking about it. If you can get connected to a good gym with good programming that will be the last programming decision you have to make. (Finding a good gym with good programming isn’t easy or automatic.)
In addition to not wanting to spend time picking programming, having everything focused into an hour is a great thing. Working out in the morning makes for a great day – especially with my work life tied to a European manufacturing entity. Manufacturing days start early. Europe starts six hours ahead of North Carolina. Making efficient use of that pre-dawn hour gives me more time to be a good husband and father.
Traveling a lot for work provides downtime in cities where it is tough to figure out what to do. Not anymore – the third way CrossFit lets me be lazy is that I just find the nearest gym and go do a drop-in. Stopping by gyms is part of the culture, it lets you push yourself and keeps you in new and challenging situations (like the time in Zurich I got lost on a run).
Cheap
My health wasn’t terrible – but it wasn’t good. My weight was too high and my diet was lousy. Several friends in similar situations had signed up with personal trainers. My average attendance cost is $15 for an action packed hour with a good group of people and the results have been great. That is a good deal.
Your Mileage May Vary
As the outstanding hosts of Barbell Shrugged are often heard to say, “there’s a difference between training and exercising,” and over time I’ve gotten more focused on training, which means I’m getting less lazy about my own programming and fitness goals. Some days, when I’m over-thinking the training component, it is nice to turn things off, head to the gym and know that I’ve got a challenging hour in front of me that produces great results.
“Anderson, it seems like you and Walter aren’t getting along very well.”
Anderson the Expert is in a tough spot, his value as an expert wasn’t well defended, but he doesn’t do very much to help himself out. Stuck in a meeting with a customer who is uncertain of their goals, a project manager intent on scoring points and a boss who appears most interested in putting together a business trip, he’s the only one in the room who seems able to deliver what the customer needs. Unfortunately, he compounds the difficulty of his position by making a few mistakes.
An opening “No”
Anderson spends a lot of his time trying to clarify what the customer wants – but his first word to them is “no.” Many of his later efforts at clarification could have been more successful had they been his opening response, rather than immediately putting the buyer on the defensive.
Let the customer speak – “Red lines”
The Customer lead mocks Anderson slightly (1.45) asking, “And what a “red line” means, I hope I don’t need to explain to you?” This was a perfect opportunity for Anderson to let the customer play out their own definition. Instead, he works hard to maintain his ‘expert’ title, rather than using it as a segue to get her definition of ‘red line’ – which would have been useful as it contains neither lines, nor the color red.
Send ahead and preparation
At several points, Anderson is forced to describe basic technical terms for his area of expertise. Color terms and perpendicularity pop up right away. Using some kind of FAQ or ‘Red Lines 101’ document would have armed him with a way to address the customer’s ignorance in a way that is not insulting and doesn’t waste anyone’s time.
Re-write the spec
As the customer continues with her definition of seven red lines, Anderson holds dearly to the spec. He’s got everyone in the room, all the decision makers are present, and rather than adjust the spec on the fly he allows himself to be trapped. He could have made the modification himself or done a hand-off to his colleagues.
Improvisation without caveats
Improvisation is fine, as long as everyone knows it isn’t predictive.
At nearly 4 minutes the customer notes that her example used a blue pen – she clearly wanted red lines. Anderson then follows this path too far, with his point-scoring project manager Walter using his own words against him. Anderson was improvising in front of the customer, but hadn’t made sufficient caveats to clarify what his results would imply. Using the proper caveats would have helped the customer understand and also improved the likelihood that the improvisation would have worked.
Playing down to the customer
If you think your customer is stupid, you are both in a bad, bad place.
The customers’ “transparent lines” comment is pretty ridiculous. Rather than address it directly by saying something like, “we can get the same effect with simply no red lines, and that will save you money,” Anderson decides to play along. At the end, frustrated he uses his expert status to claim confidence in all fields. At some point this is going to catch up to him – the customer team has their own Anderson somewhere, and when they finally discover the silliness going on here, the vendor will love all credibility. Treating the customer like a fool will not lead to a winning scenario, educating them and helping them get what they want will lead to success all the way around.
Sidebar with the customer team
Justine shows interest in the perpendicularity issue. As her request for kitten drawings emerges, it becomes clear that she could be the brains behind the customer’s desires. This provides an occasion for Anderson to have a sidebar meeting with her and resolve some of these issues directly. Empowering Justine would improve the customer’s comfort with the project and help alleviate the vendor’s technical risk in taking them on as an account.
Wrong job
Anderson’s in the wrong job. He’s clearly frustrated with his boss. The project manager he works with is more intent on embarrassing him. The customer doesn’t have any appreciation for his skills. Anderson himself seems pretty frustrated, and rather than maintaining calm, he simply caves to the social situation he finds himself in.
Your technical team’s time is a strategic resource. Use it wisely.
This meeting shouldn’t occur unless the Customer has put together a Request for Proposal (“RFP”) and the vendor has a standard Statement of Work (“SoW”). Some kind of written interaction should have occurred prior to this meeting, and a huge amount of the confusion consists of fluctuating definitions that have not been put down on paper.
Documentation forces an internal dialog about what will be delivered. It forces alignment of resources within the vendor and then between the vendor and the customer – failing to have any kind of documentation heading into a technical sales meeting or an initial project meeting as is depicted here, is a recipe for disaster.
Meeting Preparation
Anderson the Expert, Walter the Project Manager and their boss should have spent some time together preparing for this meeting – it looks like they’ve all just met each other. That meeting prep should have covered the aforementioned documentation and also a conversation about what they will and will not cover in this meeting.
Unprofessional Dialog
Walter’s comments to and about Anderson are unprofessional. He’s both promoting him as an expert and using it as a snarky comment to make himself look more important. The customer lead is already losing her patience with the vendor team. Unprofessional dialog brings efforts to clarify some of the technical gaps to a halt at several times in this dialog. With only five people in the room, it seems as if there is more focus on point-scoring than there is on finishing the project with both parties happy about the outcome.
Walter’s Presence
Walter doesn’t need to be in the meeting, and depending on what the real next tasks are, his presence is not well justified at all in this business. Having extra personnel on any kind of technical project leads to idle, empty and unhappy hands. Walter spends most of his time justifying his presence by scoring points against Anderson, the only person in the room who appears to have real value.
GigaOm’s article on green energy snake oil highlights the challenges faced by investors in any industrial technology. We’re not investors, but over the past six years of applying our process and equipment in this industrial technology space, we have certainly seen many unusual opportunities. A fair number of them don’t make any sense. Some turned out to be fraudulent.
What leads to fraud in industrial technologies?
Lots of money, much of which was grant money. With the federal initiatives through the Department of Energy and many state-based initiatives, there was a lot of money moving around. Money always attracts individuals looking to make a quick buck, or who might not know the fundamentals of the technology they are selling. With ‘Cleantech’ being a hot space in the late 2000’s and with a glut of government money (which is not usually overseen by professional investors), hucksters entered at a faster rate than normal.
They didn’t know it was a fraud. We’ve worked with several academic groups who, when it came time for scale up, were unable to repeat their earlier work. Several commercial partners have had market assumptions about either the ASP or performance targets of their benchmark that were wildly off. Under a harsh lens these mistakes nad misinterpretations could have been called fraud, when they were in fact errors.
The science is complex. Energy technologies will often combine cutting edge work in chemistry, electricity and other fields. Our process requires expertise in mechanical, chemical and electrical engineering as well as deep domain expertise in our target application areas. Translating the science from stage to stage isn’t easy. Small errors can compound. This makes diligence for investors very tough – especially if they are conducting commercial and technical diligence simultaneously.
Materials science can take a long time. Ponzi schemes end when they have consumed all the capital that they can. They move fast, like a fire. Materials science innovation is slow – it can take a long time. That provides a benefit to the huckster, who can use that time to their advantage, staying a few steps ahead of their current and future investors. Envia (below) used that time to try and cut licensing deals, which they didn’t disclose, and to push technology improvements, which didn’t happen.
Supply chain complexity can mask bad business models.Better Place was going to fix the entire automotive supply chain at once – with fast change battery swap stations and revolutionary vehicles. It never worked. When pitching his vision to Toyota, the car maker was immediately suspicious as they knew how long it had taken their market-leading Prius to achieve the numbers that the upstart was promising. The long and complex supply chain masked numbers that didn’t make any sense.
There are many other reasons that fraud could occur in industrial technology. List below are several examples of known fraudulent behavior:
Lastly – I haven’t seen any data that says that fraud is more prominent in this area as opposed to other areas of investment. Maybe the fraud rates are actually better, but it certainly is disappointing to see it occur so often.
Working with the world leaders in filtration and technical fabrics we get all kinds of inquiries that sound surprisingly similar to the meeting that Anderson the Expert sits through. Requests aren’t fully thought through, the vocabulary of the technical needs is not commonly agreed to and many of the market drivers aren’t fully known.
As a commercial leader, our team has to defend our technical resources.
We’re in a market that has a lot of potential and future growth, but one that takes a lot of nurturing to grow. If I double my sales resources, it won’t make much of an impact. If I double my equipment capabilities, it won’t make much of an impact. However, if I double the capacity of my application engineering and chemical engineering capabilities – it will have a big impact.
D-fend your technical team from meetings like the one Anderson sits through.
Doubling the technical resources isn’t easy – especially in a field like ours which requires such a diverse array of engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, civil and chemical to name a few), scientific backgrounds and market application experience.
The best way to make good use of that team is to not waste their time.
Our front end sales team must understand on their own whether or not an opportunity is real. Documentation for standardized products must be clear enough for a customer to understand without interpretation. Any area where I can free up the resources of a technical person so that they can focus on helping customers achieve their goals is an area where I need to be investing.
We defend our technical resources such that we can deploy them in the highest value areas to do the best for our customers – and subjecting Anderson the Expert to a meeting like this is clearly a waste of his time and talent.
C1 (“Customer 1st speaker”) – The customer lead, Justine’s boss
Justine – Design specialist at the customer
VENDOR
V1 (“Vendor 1st speaker”) – The vendor lead, Walter and Anderson the Expert’s boss.
Walter – Reports to V1, serves as Project Manager
Anderson the Expert (“AE”)
Transcript:
C1 –
Our company has a new strategic initiative to increase market penetration, maximize brand loyalty and enhance intangible assets In pursuit of these objectives, we’ve started a new project which will require:
Seven Red Lines
I understand your company can help us in this matter?
V1 –
Of course, Walter here will be the project manager, Walter, we can do this, can’t we?
Walter –
Yes, of course. Anderson here is our expert in all matters related to drawing red lines. We brought him along today to share his professional opinion.
C1 –
Nice to meet you! Well, you know me. This is Justine, our company’s design specialist.
Justine –
Hallo
C1 –
We need you to draw seven red lines. [Pause.]
All of them strictly perpendicular; some with green ink and some with transparent. Can you do that?
Expert / Anderson (“EA”) –
No. I’m afraid we –
Walter –
Let’s not rush into any hasty answers, Anderson! The task and needs to be carried out.
At the end of the day, you are an expert.
EA –
Youtube’s auto-transcript function is really impressive. The video had over 6.5 MM views at the time of this post.
The term “red line” implies the color of the line to be red. To draw a red line with green ink is –
well if it is not exactly impossible, then it is pretty close to being impossible.
Walter – 1:02 What does it even mean: “impossible”?
EA -1:04
I mean, it is quite possible that there are some people, say suffering from colour blindness,
for whom the colour of the lines doesn’t really make a difference. But I am quite sure that the target audience of your project does not consists solely of such people.
C1 – 1:15
So in principle this is possible.
EA – 1:19
I’ll simplify – A line as such can be drawn with absolutely any ink. But if you want to get a red line, you need to use red ink.
V1 – 1:28
What if we draw them with blue ink?
EA – 1:30
It still won’t work. If you use blue ink, you will get blue lines. And what exactly did you mean, when you talked about the transparent ink?
C1 – 1:40
How to better explain? I’m sure you know what “transparent” means?
EA – 1:44
Yes, I do.
C1 – 1:45
And what a “red line” means, I hope I don’t need to explain to you?
EA – 1:49
Of course not.
C1 – 1:50
Well… You need to draw red lines with transparent ink.
EA – 1:55
Could you describe what you imagine the end result would look like?
Walter – 1:58
C’mon, Anderson! What do we have here, kindergarten?
V1 – 2:01
Let’s not waste our time with these unproductive quarrels. The task has been set; the task is plain and clear. Now, if you have any specific questions, go ahead!
Walter – 2:11
You’re the expert here!
EA – 2:13
Alright, let’s leave aside the colour for the moment. You had something there also relating to perpendicularity?..
V1 – 2:20
Seven lines, all strictly perpendicular.
EA – 2:23
To what?
V1 – 2:26
Erm, to everything. Among themselves. I assumed you know what perpendicular lines are like!
Walter – 2:32
Of course he does. He’s an expert!
EA – 2:35
Two lines can be perpendicular. All seven can’t be simultaneously perpendicular to each other. I’ll show you.
[Steps to drawing board.]
This is a line, right?
2:48
[With hesitation.]
EA – 2:49
And another one. Is it perpendicular to the first line?
V1 – 2:55
Well… [With hesitation.]
EA – 2:57
Yes, it is perpendicular.
V1 – 2:59
Exactly!
EA – 3:00
Wait, wait, I’m not done. And a third one: is it perpendicular to the first line? Yes, it is! But it doesn’t cross the second line. They’re both parallel. Not perpendicular!
V1 – 3:16
I suppose so.
EA – 3:17
There it is. Two lines can be perpendicular —
V1 – 3:21
Can I have the pen? How about this?
EA – 3:48
This is a triangle. It’s definitely not perpendicular lines. And there are three, not seven.
V1 – 3:57
Why are they blue?
Walter – 3:58
Indeed. Wanted to ask that myself.
EA – 4:01
I have a blue pen with me. This was just a demonstration —
V1 – 4:04
That’s the problem, your lines are blue. Draw them with red ink!
EA – 4:07
It won’t solve the problem.
Walter – 4:09
How do you know before you’ve tried? Lets draw them with red ink and then let’s see.
EA – 4:12
I don’t have a red pen with me, — but I am completely certain that with red ink the result will still be the same.
Walter – 4:19
Didn’t you tell us earlier that you can only draw red lines with red ink? In fact, yes, I’ve written it down here! And now you want to draw them with a blue ink. Do you want to call these red lines?
[Chuckles to room.]
Justine – 4:29
I think I understand. You’re not talking about the colour now, right? You’re talking about that, what do you call it: per-per, dick-dick —
EA – 4:37
Perpendicularity, yes!
V1 – 4:38
That’s it, now you’ve confused everyone. So what exactly is stopping us from doing this?
EA – 4:44
Geometry.
C1 – 4:46
Just ignore it!
V1 – 4:47
We have a task. Seven red lines. It’s not twenty; it’s just seven.
Anderson, I understand; you’re a specialist of a narrow field, you don’t see the overall picture.
But surely it’s not a difficult task to draw some seven lines!
Walter – 5:01
Exactly. Suggest a solution! Any fool can criticize, no offence, but you’re an expert, you should know better!
EA – 5:10
OK. Let me draw you two perfectly perpendicular red lines, — and I will draw the rest with transparent ink. They’ll be invisible, but I’ll draw them.
V1 – 5:21
Would this suit us? Yes, this will suit us.
Justine – 5:26
Yes, but at least a couple with green ink. Oh, and I have another question, if I may. Can you draw one of the lines in the form of a kitten?
EA – 5:34
A what?
Justine – 5:35
In the form of a kitten. Market research tells our users like cute animals. It’d be really great if —
EA – 5:40
No-oh…
Justine – 5:42
Why?
EA – 5:42
Look, I can of course draw you a cat. I’m no artist, but I can give it a try. But it won’t be a line any more. It will be a cat. A line and a cat: those are two different things.
V1 – 5:51
A kitten. Not a cat, but a kitten. It’s little, cute, cuddly. Cats, on the other hand —
EA – 5:58
It doesn’t make a difference.
Walter – 5:59
Anderson, at least hear her out! She hasn’t even finished speaking, and you’re already saying “No!”
EA – 6:04
I got the idea, but it is impossible to draw a line in the form of a cat…ten.
Justine – 6:10
What about a bird?
V1 – 6:15
So, where did we stop? What are we doing?
Walter – 6:17
Seven red lines, two with red ink, two with green ink and the rest – with transparent.
Did I understand correctly? — — Yes.
V1 – 6:23
Excellent! In which case that’s everything, right?
Justine – 6:26
Oh, oh, I almost forgot, we also have a red balloon.
Do you know if you could inflate it?
EA – 6:34
What do I have to do with balloons?
Justine – 6:37
It’s red.
V1 – 6:38
Anderson, can you or can you not do this? A simple question.
EA – 6:42
As such, I can of course, but —
V1 – 6:43
Excellent. Organise a business trip, we’ll cover the expenses, — go over to their location, inflate the balloon. Well this was very productive, thank you all!
Justine – 7:08
Can I ask one more question, please? When you inflate the balloon, could you do it in the form of a kitten?
EA – 7:16
Of course I can! I can do anything, I can do absolutely anything. I’m an “expert”!
O’Shaughnessy’s The Men Who Lost America (21 hours) follows the Revolutionary War theme and contains two great personnel stories; the value of concentrating a team and managing a team’s utilization.
King George III – loser of the Revolutionary War.
The book is a series of biographies beginning with King George III of the great Englishmen who fought, and ultimately lost the Revolutionary War against the US. One of their great failings was under-estimating Washington, his ability to raise an army, and the effectiveness of that army. During the terrible winter at Valley Forge, Washington’s troops fell from 14,000 to just over 7,000. The force was concentrated – despite the terrible circumstances the army emerged stronger and more committed to the cause. The Continental Army was able to lose half of its fighting force and emerge a more potent weapon.
O’Shaugnessy covers the lives of the brothers Howe, General Burgoyne and Cornwallis – common throughout the narrative is their frequent lack of troops. The British had expected to find a supportive local population, but instead were in the midst of an uprising.
The English generals had sufficient troops to take territory or to hold territory, but not both. The differences here are similar to Musso’s discussion of insertion (getting a new material into a market) and penetration (increasing share in a known application space). This lack of resources amplified the other strategic challenges that the generals faced throughout the war.
The Breeze iOS app by RunKeeper is amazing and very disruptive towards the personal pedometer / intelligent fitness tracker space within wearables.
Software Only = No New Hardware
I’ve looked at FitBit and other devices many times. My wife has tried several similar products. I’ve been more partial to Suunto or Polar heart rate monitors than I have been to pedometer and activity tracking events. With Breeze there is no new hardware. I just downloaded the iOS app and the software is able to make use of the chipset and sensors that are standard on iPhone 5s. Not having to get new physical hardware, with all of its charging and other needs, is a huge advantage.
Loads with Data
Your iPhone’s hardware already has this data on you and keeps it on a rolling 7 day basis. When you first load up Breeze, it starts with your last seven days of activity right away. That FitBit you ordered by mail can’t do this – no other hardware product can do this. You’ve been carrying the device with you already, the software simply unlocks new potential.
The app loaded with seven days of history; this just isn’t possible with newly purchased hardware – user feedback arrives right away.
Never Forget Your Device
When I get to work, the iPhone goes into a charger near my PC. There’s a similar storage spot at home. Not anymore though – putting the device down prevents me from getting credit for all of those steps. This is particularly true if I’m working at a standing desk (which may or may not count). This is the first time I’ve had an app that makes me want to be sure that the phone is always physically on me – that’s something Apple will want to promote and encourage, even if it is a bit creepy.
Pricing = Free
The basic app now is free. Premium services make a lot of sense and can go in many, many previously explored directions. Sharing? Exercise recommendations? Scoreboard for you and your peers? All of these have potential as add-on features that could command premium pricing.
If I’m FitBit or another similar physical product maker, the need to have an app in this space right away is big. This is a large user base (iOS with iPhone 5s and future releases) with reverse compatibility into their device who now have no reason to buy one of your devices. Congratulations to the team at RunKeeper for releasing a good app quickly that makes use of the hardware’s capabilities.
Running numbers is crucial to understanding where you are with a new technology, especially if it is a physical product or tied to heavy industry. Even if you’ve only got three numbers in that initial .xls sheet, your ability to follow those assumptions over time and measure performance is important. Further, you’ll get better at your forecasting if you keep a record of what your past estimates were.
Munitions
I’ve been reading / listening to three books that deal a lot with estimates of munition sizes, payloads and other constraints from World War II; The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes, Dam Busters (14 hours), by Holland, and To Kingdom Come by Mrazek. The math that went in to planning the equipment and raids was similar to what would go into current manufacturing planning.
The six-engine British Victory bomber; arrived at through iteration and working the math.
Scope: What was the size of the target
Munition size: How big were the munitions needed to destroy the target
Delivery mechanism: What size aircraft was needed to deliver the payload
Probability: How many attempts would be required
Throughout these three texts there are multiple examples of the right engineers, scientists and operations personnel sitting together to talk through how they achieve their common goal. Often times their early math wasn’t right. Often, their goal in engineering and R&D was to enable the math to occur. However, in all of these examples, having done the math they were able to work towards the needed goals.
Production and Plant Capacity
Working with a typical filter maker or nonwovens manufacturer benefits from working similar math. Often times we know a target unit cost, but we are working with a customer through a long and complex product development cycle. Penciling out some rough numbers early on in the development cycle can help put any known issues on the table sooner rather than later.
Installing a turn-key production line is easier if you do the math earlier.
Unit cost – this is a great place to begin and usually helps flush out a lot of issues. By looking at the costs of the benchmark material, making some margin assumptions and cost estimates, you can understand a lot about what you’ll need.
Line speed – line speed is often an area of importance, it obviously feeds into your unit cost assumptions, and depending on the geography different buyers may run in different shift configurations. Not everyone has 24x7x365 capabilities, which is good to know early.
Volume – For nonwovens and rolled goods, this is easy; take my line speed, my usuable width, my operating time less downtime and you’ve got your annual volume capacity for a given line.
Capex – Spend more money and you can get a line that makes more. This is especially true in electrospinning where it is always possible to go faster (our current fastest installation is 50 m/min – we could take that recipe faster with a more expensive line).
Market demand – This is the greatest sanity check to apply and one we are always quick to look for. We once had a customer that was requesting a line speed we thought was very aggressive. In the meeting I couldn’t figure out why it made me so uncomfortable – looking at industry reports later that evening I realized that at that speed they would be making 7x current market demand. That was an important sanity check!
Others – there’s no shortage of metrics that are valuable. The earlier you take a look and use them in a conversation with a customer, the easier it is to understand what it takes to succeed.
There’s another reason it is a good idea to have the math available earlier rather than later. Learning the potential red flags early in an engagement is helpful for everyone. If there are unrealistic expectations or if a production partner doesn’t know an answer to an important question, or isn’t willing to share, then being able to put those issues out front leads to a healthier long term relationship.
Innovation is a newborn baby that politicians love to kiss – regions and municipalities want more of it, but are uncertain of how to proceed. Metrics are challenging – for the politician and bureaucrat it isn’t clear whether they should measure GDP impact, jobs created, or any of a dozen other metrics. Determining the right time frame for measurement (other than the time to the next election) is equally difficult.
Working with industrial technology provides occasions to interact with many in government who struggle with identifying what they should be promoting and determining what tools are best suitable to the task. Standing in 2014, there are several technologies that were furthered by innovation policy that are clear in retrospect. While these are older technologies that saw their early development in a time of war, their lessons hold true today and serve as a framework for what can work now.
World War II and Radar
The military needs of World War II forced an alignment of incentive and ruthless focus that accelerated the development of computers, radar, nuclear technologies, and rocketry. The programs that prioritized and developed radar and nuclear weapons are fascinating and increasingly available for study.
Bush’s 1945 writings on innovation policy hold true today.
Vandevar Bush ran the US Office of Scientific Research and Development (“OSRD”) and at the close of the war submitted Science, the The Endless Frontier to the President as a template for how organized, systematic innovation could be pursued over the coming decades. Bush had understood how the scientific industrial complex he had helped organized could continue to deliver new innovation to science over the coming decades. Anyone currently interested in innovation policy would be pleased to see how his words hold true over time and serve as the framework for much of what we know works in this field.
Tuxedo Park tells the story of Alfred Lee Loomis, an influential financier who in the early days of World War II worked to consolidate the resources of the civilian population to understand what was possible and prioritize those nascent R&D efforts.
The title of Buderi’s The Invention that Changed the World makes it clear how important radar was to stopping Nazi aggression. With radar, the British could more accurately and efficiently deploy their smaller fighter fleet against incoming raids. As radar improved in performance and shrunk in size it could be deployed in aircraft, something that enemy researchers had thought impossible. This allowed for improved defense against aircraft and improved bombing accuracy. Radar in World War II would serve the same function as strategic reconnaissance in the Cold War; it allowed the deployment of smaller forces to exactly match the capabilities of the opposing force, rather than requiring a huge force that anticipated any possible threat of attack.
Munitions and the Manhattan Project
To understand the munition needs of the time, it is helpful to know what was being targeted. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany by David Blackbourn tells the story of how the energy producing dams of Germany were built, the rivers which had their course changed and the impact it had on Germany’s industrial capacity. These dams themselves were the result of industrial policy that dates back to the time of Frederick the Great. This creates the interesting scenario where the innovation policy of the Allies had to first set out to reduce the advantages that Germany had developed over previous generations from their own innovation policy.
Hager’s The Alchemy of Air is a biography of the inventors of the Haber-Bosch process that describes the heavy industry which consumed the power of the dams. Their achievements would serve as the backbone of the German chemical industry leading into World War II. Dam Busters (14 hours), by Holland, describes the innovative weapon system designed pursued by the British to destroy these dams and deprive Germany industry of the power they provided.
Rhodes is the first and best text on the subject.
The most significant munitions development in World War II was obviously the Manhattan Project and the resulting nuclear weapons that were developed. The authoritative book on this topic is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Rhodes. The paperback edition is nearly 900 pages, the notes are extensive and his approach to the history of all of the characters is thorough. His writing on the history of Judaism in Europe and Germany in particular are very thorough.
The technical leader of the Los Alamos team and facility, Robert Oppenheimer, would go on to become a conflicted person in US history. Vilified by the very government he served and helped lead to victory, his story is well told in the 28 hours of American Prometheus by Bird and Sherwin. The authors explore his early life, brilliance as a physicist and surprising success as an administrator not just at Los Alamos but also after the war at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ.
The leadership that developed the atomic bomb was wise enough to listen to the likes of Loomis, Bush and Oppenheimer – but at the same time committed the resources of the government in order to ensure its success. Jean Edward Smith’s FDR (32 hours) is a thorough biography of the President that led the country into the war and contains significant material on his motivations and relationship to innovation policy. Equally extensive is David McCullough’s Truman (54 hours), which details the role he played in enforcing honesty among military contractors as the US was just beginning to mobilize for the war. Truman was handed the results of the innovation policy – a weapon of previously unimaginable scale that was ready for deployment.
Apollo Program
Rocketry saw its origin in the aggression of World War II and would see its use for a peaceful demonstration of might following the insights of Eisenhower and JFK about the costs of competing head to head against a Russia with unknowable resources. The Apollo program is the most successful example of innovation policy – it combined government, military and civilian resources to accomplish a goal so far ahead of its time that is not achievable today.
All three of these technologies had clear goals. Radar needed to improve performance and shrink in size. The Manhattan project had munitions targets it had to achieve. Apollo had to deliver mankind to the moon. With clear goals in place and with the appropriate balance between government objectives and civilian ingenuity, those objectives were met.
Fred Lybrand 
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