At Jan-Olaf's request, this entry is slighly edited down from my blog (TH!NKING IN THE SUN, 24 July, post the TH!NK session in Provence, http://www.johnelkington.com/weblog/blogger.htm
EasyJetted from Gatwick to Marseilles on Saturday morning, with Doug Miller of GlobeScan ( http://www.globescan.com), to take part in a brainstorm session on the future of the TH!NK electric car company ( http://www.think.no), chez Jan-Olaf Willums. With four partners at InSpire Invest ( http://www.inspiregroup.no/), Jan-Olaf recently bought the company. He picked us up at the airport and drove us to Mas des Graviers, his extraordinary home-from-home outside Pourrières.
Among those also taking part were people from Inspire and TH!NK, plus Alf Bjorseth of Scatec (Norway), Richard Blundell of Environmental Businesses (Switzerland), John Boesel of Calstart in the USA ( http://www.calstart.org/), Patrik Kunzler of MIT's MediaLab, Philip MacNamara of Inspire Nation (Eire), Eva Solheim of Innovation Norway (she's based in San Francisco), Ber Sweering of ABNAmro (The Netherlands), and Claude Fussler - who also now lives in Provence, is a long-standing friend and colleague, and used to work with Dow Europe and then the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
The idea behind TH!NK can be tracked back to the 1973-74 oil crisis, when Lars Ringdal conceived the idea for a compact plastic-bodied urban car. (Early designs struck me as rather like garbage cans on wheels, but more recent products have been more attractive.) The idea lay dormant for several years, but growing environmental concerns in the late 1980s got things back on the road. In 1990 PIVCO AS (the Personal Independent Vehicle Company) was founded by Lars' son, Jan Otto Ringdal. During the Lillehammer Olympic Games in 1994, only electric cars were allowed into the centre of town, where 10 second generation PIVCO prototypes were tested under pretty extreme climate conditions. PIVCO's third vehicle generation was developed during 1994 and 1995, and named CityBee in Europe and Citi in USA.
Financial difficulties temporarily stalled development, but in January 1999 the Ford bought a 51% share of PIVCO Industries, which was renamed Think Nordic AS. That was shortly after SustainAbility started working with Ford. Ford later bought the remaining 49% of Think Nordic and formed the Think Group, which led the development of environmentally friendly vehicle technology in Ford. Over the course of the next two-and-a-half years, 1005 vehicles were produced, creating one of the largest fleets of electric vehicles on the road. The car was sold in 14 countries, including Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and selected cities in Europe and the United States.
Despite considerable investment and a fair amount of progress, Ford announced in August 2002 that they were pulling out of Think Nordic, on the basis that they wanted to concentrate on other alternative technologies such as hybrids and fuel cells. On February 1st, 2003 Kamkorp Microelectronics was announced as Think Nordic's new owner - and it was from Kamkorp that InSpire recently bought the company.
We had an extremely productive series of sessions, and a good deal of fun, with pretty much everyone becoming more enthusiastic about the potential of the product and business as the meeting progressed. Certainly the ambience and home-produced wine helped, but then I have always found the combination of cities, mobility, design and sustainability a fairly heady mix.
For me, it's all part of my growing fascinating with the world of entrepreneurial solutions to sustainability challenges, which I'm working on both as part of our evolving program of work funded by the Skoll Foundation ( http://www.skollfoundation.org) and in the book I'm doing with Pamela Hartigan of The Schwab Foundation ( http://www.schwabfound.org).
Even if Ford ultimately couldn't make sense of the TH!NK business, part of what drives me in all of this is a growing interest in understanding what mainstream business can learn about tomorrow's value, markets and business models from the ever-widening spectrum of social and environmental entrepreneurs, and - at the same time - how big companies and financial institutions can weigh in, both helpfully and sucessfully.
The blog has a selection of photos taken during the event.