Unicorn Daydreams

Doomed to Repeat History? An electric vehicle was the bestselling car in the United States, 125 years ago (Standage, 2021) . In 1897 the Pope Manufacturing Company’s most popular model, the Columbia Motor Carriage, was outselling all other options for powered transportation. Electric automobiles had been in development since as early as 1832, when Robert Anderson built his first working electrified car (Department of Energy, n.d.) . Can you imagine how the world might have been different if the electric car, which at one point Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were working together to improve, had never been surpassed by the internal combustion engine? The companies producing electrified vehicles were ultimately undone by technological, economic, and cultural forces. First, the battery chemistry of the early 1900s was limited by the short range of travel that it allowed, with none other than Thomas Edison remarking that the “problem so far has been to build a storage battery of lig...

  John Lennon sang that life is what happens when you’re making other plans, and this apt phrase was in use for decades before Lennon included it in a song. The aphorism makes sense to me, as so much of what happens in life seems accidental or unexpected, and often our planning fails to bear the fruit we expected. This is true in innovation as well, with many examples of inventors stumbling upon a key insight by accident, sometimes in stark contrast to their meticulous planning. Serendipity describes the confluence of circumstances by chance that leads to a good outcome. When all the traffic lights on the commute home, after a long and exhausting day at work, are all green at just the right time – that’s serendipity. No work or action could lead to the outcome, it’s mere chance that the various systems and timers and lights line up just perfectly. (I know, some would argue that transportation engineers carefully evaluate traffic patterns and such, but the lights are all red far ...

As someone who has reached middle age, depending on how it’s defined these days, I spend time thinking about the future and how I want to spend it. I go for many long walks and use the time to think about my life, what it could look like and what I hope for in the coming years. It’s fun to think sometimes about “Top 10” lists of what I would do with unlimited time, money, and talent, and escapist dreaming can sometimes lead to real changes in life. With that in mind I’ve built my own set of “Top 10” lists, reflecting my crazy – and sometimes not so crazy – ideas of what I would do if nothing was off the table. Neural Plasticity ·          Take community college classes in every subject, learn a little bit of everything ·          Obtain my Juris Doctorate degree ·          Learn four new languages to a conversational level – Spanish, Italian, French, German ·...

Introduction Research in Motion (RIM), founded in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in Waterloo, Ontario, was a transformative part of the revolutionary changes in the growth and usage of wireless telecommunications services (Seth, 2023) . RIM released its first mobile device in 1998, which featured keyboard buttons and a first-of-its-kind trackball device, enabling wireless and remote use of corporate email, a technology rapidly growing in its own right. Throughout the early 2000s Blackberry continued to release increasingly capable mobile devices, and at its peak counted more than 85 million global subscribers to its proprietary services. Importantly, these subscribers were heavily skewed towards corporate professionals and company leaders, based on the successful integration with corporate information technology (IT) systems and the enhanced security controls provided within the BlackBerry ecosystem. During this period BlackBerrys were status symbols with upwardly mobile pro...

  I have a few favorite speculative fiction books that I read every few years. Most of them are simple touchstones of the generation I belong to or remind me of fond days spending an entire day as an adolescent burning through a new book that I’d found. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (2003), isn’t one of those pre-teen memories, rather it’s a book that I discovered in my twenties while sinking into the culture of software development and coding as I started my first real career. The book describes a deeply dystopian future but includes many startling predictions which have come to pass to varying degrees. Predictions like the rise of corporate conglomerates controlling many aspects of life and the franchising of nearly every service or experience including the Mafia and entire cultures are sufficiently general to be ignored as specific scenario predictions. And then there is Stephenson’s coining of the term, “metaverse”, and his description of fully realized virtual world that ca...

On August 4 the majority shareholders of the company which controls the company that I work for issued a Schedule 13D to the Securities and Exchange Commission which suggested that they were open to a potential sale of the business or other alternatives (FitzGerald, 2023). The form, like most of its kind, was not conclusive, despite media interpretation to the contrary, the majority shareholders did not commit to a sale or to taking any action with respect to the company. All the same, the event caused me to engage in my own form of scenario planning, where in the past I had practiced traditional forecasting with respect to my prospects at the company. The process of scenario planning produces “a portfolio of future scenarios, each representing a different way your … landscape could look in a few years” (Wade, 2012). This approach does not attempt to evolve the current environment along known axes, rather it identifies a range of potential scenarios which might plausibly emerge given t...