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...