3 Innovation Lessons from Elon Musk: Innovation Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX
This is an excerpt from my 9th book ‘Innovate Like Elon Musk.’ Purchase it on Amazon, here if you are in South Africa, or, visit South African bookstores.
- — -
In this section, we will look at some of the explicit instances that indicate innovative business manoeuvres and first-principle innovations employed by Elon Musk’s companies. Some portray material-to-proprietary innovation, and others are marginal improvements.
1. Hires smart people and let them figure solutions
At the founding of SpaceX, Musk hired various engineers to help build these would be novel rockets that would cost clients a fraction of the then going rate.
Tom Mueller was set to build the engines. Timothy Buzza was a renowned rockets tester. Chris Thompson had managed the production of rockets at Boeing. This is to name a few.
SpaceX’s founding and Musk being the first investor was because his cofounders were people who had been thinking and tinkering with the idea of rechargeable electric vehicles. JB Straubel had worked on electric cars and was already thinking that lithium-ion batteries had advanced to propel electric vehicle technology. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning had already fallen in love with lithium-ion batteries as an option for electric vehicles. They discovered this while working on their ebook reader startup NuvoMedia.
All these people are artisans in engineering and technology. They get their hands dirty. And therefore, they can and did notice adjacent possibilities that can turn into proprietary-novelty.
Diarmuid O’Connell joined Tesla in 2006 and was hired to look for funding. He had a management consulting background and was chief of staff for the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.
He got Tesla a life-saving loan from The Department of Energy to the tune of $465 million in 2010.[1]
2. Over promises to deliver proprietary-to-novel products in short time but delivers a bit late | A PR advantage that leads to pre-orders
Musk suffers from over promising and delivering a tad bit late — but not under-delivering.
In January 2005, the Tesla team had built their first Tesla prototype car, the Roadster. With Martin Eberhard as CEO, they announced it would come out in 2006 and would have a leading single charge range of 250 miles.[2]
Soon afterwards they started taking pre-orders at $100 000.
Later on, in a New York Times feature, he changed the release date to mid-2007.
With the delays happening, Eberhard was demoted from CEO to president of technology.
The first Tesla Roadster was delivered on February 2008 to Elon Musk. It had a travel range of a leading 200 miles on a single charge — and not the 250 miles they promised earlier.[3]
Prior to this time and the 2005 announcement, Tesla still had engineering problems like overheating and batteries catching fire.
The point here, the team was making these bold announcements while their engineering was not yet sorted.
Such bold announcements, of course, garner a lot of PR. In addition, they generated millions in pre-orders.
Because they did not have a complete government-approved vehicle, they packaged the pre-orders as joining a fee for a club. You just happened to get a car with the joining fee.
Founded in 2002, SpaceX announced it would have its first rocket launched in November 2003 — a few months after its founding.
It was only in December 2005 that the rocket (Falcon 1) was ready for launch.
A helium and oxygen leak by a faulty valve caused them to postpone. The second attempt was on the 20 December 2005 was cancelled due to bad weather.
Falcon successfully launched on 24 March 2006.
SpaceX and Tesla’s ventures were in of themselves bold in that they presented a tinkering with novel innovations. As such, they attracted global PR.
3. Positive naivety
I call it positive naivety to embark on bold ventures, spend your money, and naively give shorter delivery dates that you meet but later.
[1] Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla Get Far More Government Money than NPR https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-spacex-tesla-far-132000900.html
[2] Hot sports car with no gas tank / Electric roadster’s maker says it does 130 mph — but it doesn’t come cheap, By
Michael Taylor (9 August 2006) https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Hot-sports-car-with-no-gas-tank-Electric-2514556.php
[3] Electric Car Evolution, By Zachary Shahan (26 April 2015)
