Reilly Brennan

How to Start a Secret Innovation Team

I pulled automaker patent filing information over the last 24 months and you can see some really eye-opening trends. 1) GM and Toyota have more IP filings related to connected vehicles, autonomy, and next-generation technologies than all the other OEMs combined. Ford is on the rise over the last 12 months, but the timeframe I used is a clear GM / Toyota landscape. 2) The same group of individuals keeps popping up as listed inventors, and there is a very clear 80/20 principle at play. These are not names you would have ever read in the press, but in my mind they are actually more critical individual talents who are working on things more exciting than I ever see at an auto show.

At a very high level, many are international, female, and within electrical engineering. At both GM and Toyota, there are three individuals at each company who stand out as having both an incredibly high number of patent citations and also an incredibly high quality of citations.

If you were to gather these six together to start a new innovation team, you’d have quite a group. In fact, if I was a particular company in Cupertino, I would give them all nice offers and a little room to run. Of course, I have no idea if these people are good co-workers. But this general way of thinking would be a good start.

By the way, I have this list of names (and I’m not sharing it). With one exception, all are still employed at GM and Toyota as of today.

Alternative Route Optimizing

Consumer navigation systems give us the ‘best’ route, which is often defined by time: how do I get there fastest? There are some slight modifications (toll/no toll), but time optimization is typical, and rightly so.

But we are starting to see some new things appear that will change our routing options: more available data fields that make possible alternative route optimization (A.R.O.) and more user interest in routing based on something other than a time model.

A few useful (and hypothetical) examples of how you might want to optimize your route:

• Safety optimization: I want to commute to work in a flow of traffic with drivers who have the lowest number of points on their license.
  
• Consumer optimization: My coffee-loving cousin is in town and I want to drive a route that exposes us to the highest-rated cafes.
  
• Health optimization: I want a route with the lowest possible carbon exposure.
  
• Visual optimization: Route me along a path with the highest-rated Instagram photos tagged with #landscape.
  
• Bicycle optimization: I want a bicycling route that avoids intersections with a history of high car/bicycle collisions (this example courtesy Eric Nakagawa). 
  

Right now our primary cost model for routing is valued in minutes, but I expect we will see a lot of change in this over the coming years. Some startups working on route optimization are Foxtrot Systems, Routific, Routist (recently bought by Fleetmatics) and I know of a number of teams who are planning on getting into the space.

(photo by Sylwia Bartyzel)

Are we ready for autonomous cars?

People tend to view product innovations as distinct points on a timeline, but new things are often a culmination of technical progress and human acceptance. This is never more true than with the future of the automobile, where automated driving appears to demand such an exacting blend of technology and humanity.

Long ago we decided to assign portions of the driving experience to a machine. Trust developed because we retained agency over the features and they worked when we wanted them to work. We mediate these controls explicitly – cruise control can be turned on, but it can be turned off quite readily.

Yet, over the years we offloaded more and more silent tasks to the vehicle, running in the background or only in times of need. Generally under the rubric of safety, these leaps of faith occurred in areas such as anti-lock brakes, traction control, blind spot detection, rear view backup monitoring, pre-crash seatbelt adjustments and the like. These were and are proto-autonomous features, but we did not anticipate the caterpillars would grow into butterflies.

These innovations laid groundwork for the technical progress of the future – and our consent to it. Today your car has a number of ingredients for autonomy if not the full recipe. Socially you could say the same.

What was once trumpeted as progress, such as Ralph Teetor’s modern invention of cruise control some 60 years ago (“New for 1960! Auto-pilot!”), isn’t even tweeted about today. We’re beyond trust – just plain and utter acceptance.

Are we ready to trust autonomous vehicles? We are ready to continue trusting vehicles. Eventually those vehicles will be autonomous. And we’ll accept them.

(photo via David Marcu)

Moving From Idea -> Pant -> Pants

Abe Burmeister is the co-founder of Outlier, a clothing brand that fits somewhere between outdoor gear and fashion. Its origin is like a lot of classical entrepreneurial narratives: to scratch the founder’s itch – bicycling gear was really quite frumpy. He built Outlier from that idea into something much larger.

I like how he moves the concept along here from idea to one pair of pants to multiple pants. Each stage has its own needs and challenges. It’s a good story well told. Thanks to frontliner Colin Nagy for pointing me to this.

Q&A With Ted Serbinski of Techstars Mobility

Last week there was big news out of Detroit that will impact an entire generation of entrepreneurs: Techstars is opening an accelerator in the city that will focus exclusively on mobility and transportation ideas. This is a fantastic development for the little corner of the world that I happen to love dearly: where software and communications meets transportation. Just think of all the new entrepreneurs, investors and jobs that will emerge as a result of this announcement. 

The title of the 3-month accelerator is Techstars Mobility: Driven by Detroit and will be run by my friend Ted Serbinkski, a former SF entrepreneur who moved to Detroit three years ago to become a partner at Detroit Venture Parters. Because this is a new program with a new focus, I wanted to ask him a few questions about how the program will take shape. Below is a brief Q&A with Ted that we did this week.

Mobility is a great term and more flexible perhaps than ‘automotive.’ What does Mobility mean to you as you look for startups for the first class?

The best way to describe this is to quote Techstars’ Dave Drach: “Anything from Uber to tire rubber.” I think the definition is very broad because it’s emerging. Mobility is, after all, the intersection of systems. It represents the movement of people and things and everything that interfaces. Almost by its very nature, it has to do both software and hardware. This makes it unlike a lot of 'traditional’ things that you might see at other accelerators.

Detroit has a natural embedded set of experts for this topic. How will a startup get to leverage that when they’re in Techstars?

First off, we have three big partners and that makes a big difference. Ford, Magna and Verizon represent three different kinds of partners: OEM, Tier 1 and communications provider. The sponsors commit money, but they’ve also unofficially committed mentoring the program. Actually, Bill Ford has said he wants to be a mentor to our startups. I’m not sure you see someone of that level being a mentor at any other accelerator.

Detroit makes a difference in this program and I imagine we’ll see a higher percentage the companies stay here versus other programs. After all, the costs are lower and the benefits are greater given the embedded relationships with the automotive world.

It has been said transportation startups take longer than average to build because of the entrenched system of large companies, munis, etc. Is that changing?

We won’t be changing the overall rule of thumb, but for our companies we will be accelerating their access to key decision makers. Instead of taking nine months to get inside a big company, imagine if you could do that the first week of the program? The process will be condensed. The big advantage is ramping up across the spectrum from OEM to Tier 1 to communications company in a matter of days. They win on the knowledge game.

If you were applying, what would you make sure your application communicated?

One of the key things is understanding this program has three partners involved. Can you work with one or three of these partners in a unique way? Does getting their help or feedback fundamentally change / accelerate how you grow your business? In order to do this, of course you have to be at a certain level where you can work with partners or be at a level where you can get meaningful feedback.

One thing people might not know about our March 15 deadline is that you can start on your application and save it and come back to it later. I’d recommend doing that as opposed to starting it in one sitting.

Applications for the program are open now through March 15. I’m joining Ted’s merry band of pranksters as a mentor and will be present in Detroit a few times during the program and at demo day in September.

Your Version of ‘Needing to Music Shop Every Week’

In this Resident Advisor interview, my old friend Ryan Elliott talks about how he went from working in finance in Ford Motor Company and not knowing how to DJ to eventually…becoming a resident at what is likely the best techno club in the world, the Berghain in Berlin. Quite a ramp up.

I like what he reiterates in this interview that the basic core unit of being good is something that the outside world often overlooks but you as the creator should never minimize – in fact it is vital. For him this is expressed (at 34:15) as ‘needing to music shop every week.’

'One of the most important things to me is that DJs need to music shop every week. Then you can stay grounded in what new releases are coming out and see the kind of lay of the land. Sometimes I get tired, but it’s kind of a good tired, like after a run.’

For an artist it is needing to sketch every week, for basketball players it is free throws in the gym, etc. These are the mostly hidden, mostly unseen and largely uncelebrated aspects of the job. But if you love the job, you love that part too and as Ryan indicates even when he gets tired, he’s not really that tired. Over the last few months doing FoT on Sunday evenings is my personal version of this.

Any mention of Ryan Elliott on this site also requires a link to the Baby’s on Fire Superpitcher remix.