Innovation and Opportunity

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines invention as, “something invented as a product of the imagination”. Imagination is often spurred by need, and necessity is the mother of invention. Carrying it a step further, one could say that invention that gets out into the world is innovation, defined by Webster as, “the introduction of something new”. And innovators often find new opportunities.

Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the world has seen profound changes – inventions and innovations – that have affected the way we live. Arguably the root of most of the inventions of the 19th century was oil. In his book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Daniel Yergin credits oil as “the world’s biggest and most pervasive business, the greatest of the great industries that arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century.”

Oil was discovered in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Up until that time, the world was lit by whale oil. But by the mid-nineteenth century, the growing population and decimation of the whale population in the Atlantic necessitated whalers to go farther afield, which resulted in exorbitantly high prices for whale oil. A by-product of Drake’s discovery was kerosene. It was plentiful and cheap, the first innovative derivative of oil, and became the primary fuel for lamps. By the end of the nineteenth century, improved fractionation methods saw increasing uses and applications of oil by-products, which furthered the progress of some already existing industries – steel and railroads – and spawned the development of many new ones – electrical power, automobile, aircraft, travel, communications – to name only a few.

For the better part of 149 years, cheap oil has had much to do with the world’s techno-logical, social, and economic development. It has been the essential fuel of modern capitalism, and has allowed the many conveniences and luxuries that its people have enjoyed and taken for granted. Those of us in the United States have become “addicted” to oil. Now exceeding a population of 300 million, our society has grown up in the midst of abundance. The U.S. automobile fleet approaches 200 million, commercial and private aircraft number in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, we heat our homes, office buildings and entire cities, and manufacture myriads of products, all of which rely on the use of oil to one degree or another.

There are those who say the world is running out of oil. Dr. M. King Hubbert, renown for his calculations of oil discovery and depletion, forecast that the world would begin to deplete its supplies sometime between 2005 and 2015. He coined the term “Peak Oil”, that point at which oil supplies would be outstripped by demand. If and when that becomes reality, other observers have predicted that economic and political chaos would most certainly follow.

If the world is running out of oil, as many naysayers claim, the need for substitute sources becomes increasingly apparent. Many alternative sources now exist, they are needed, and the opportunities are beginning to emerge to exploit them, which can lead to the development of new small businesses for enterprising entrepreneurs: residential rooftop windmills; solar roof panels; geothermal heat pumps from heat sinks just six feet under our feet; tidal power; river power; hydro; and methane. The possibilities aren’t endless, but there are possibilities – and opportunities.

Need – imagination – innovation – opportunity.

Stay tuned……..

Dave Sandberg
Business Counselor
Massey Center for Business Innovation and Development
At Robert Morris University