Miss Management: We love it when a plan comes together…

April 9, 2010 | Galynn Nordstrom

On March 30, The Teijin Group unveiled a super-lightweight electric concept car made with proprietary materials and technologies including carbon fiber composites, polycarbonate resins and bio-derived polyester—their vision of what a vehicle will look like on the market in five to ten years. The Teijin Technology Innovation Center and the Teijin Composites Innovation Center were established in 2008 to pursue joint development initiatives with customers—a “customer lab” program of solution-oriented collaboration.

Last week, I wrote about making biomedical devices from hagfish slime, carpeting from corn, car interiors from crabs, kimonos from bioplastics and composites from chicken feather fibers. These innovations are under development all over the world—but of the projects and organizations mentioned in that editorial, only one is headquartered in the United States. We have natural resources, passion and inspiration, too—and we’d be making better use of them if we’d shift our political priorities from past and future elections and supposed candidates who aren’t qualified to run a Dairy Queen and back into resurrecting a real economy.

In recent decades, our focus seems to have shifted from making products to handling money. Our current economy is showing the results. This recession’s effects are and continue to be global, but investments in innovation are continuing, and accelerating—in some places. It’s those places that are doing the long-term thinking, and it’s those places that will reap the benefits of it.

Innovation need not be world-shaking, but it does need to be engineered with the needs of the customer in mind. Where are the awnings that change color, generate power, send text messages to their owners about current weather conditions or burglars, defeat hurricanes and make a nourishing broth when retired? Or, on a subject a little closer to home, where are the geotextiles that can turn Minnesota pavements into smooth, lavishly pothole-free stretches of public roadways that won’t swallow Teijin’s little electric cars whole—that funnel runoff to nearby gardens, help to absorb tailpipe emissions and light up at night so we can send text messages to orbiting astronauts, or visiting aliens? (If social media marketing is so pervasive, we can’t limit it to just this planet.)

The Industrial Fabrics Foundation (IFF), the part of the Industrial Fabrics Association International (IFAI) dedicated to supporting research and education in the specialty fabrics industry, has just announced the first-ever IFF Innovation Award program, with the winner to be announced at IFAI Expo Americas 2010 in Orlando this October. The Innovation Award is intended to inspire companies from all over the world to come up with great ideas—and then to make them happen. The contest is open to any company that has developed and manufactured an innovative product related to the specialty fabrics industry. For entry information, visit www.indfabfnd.com.

The idea is to inspire others in the industry as well, transforming ideas into action—and helping to transform an economy back into an engine of production as well as consumption. Getting back to the subject of natural resources, we’ve got a lot of people nearing retirement that are going to need something productive to do. Soon.

Or they’re all going to start writing blogs.

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