IN the midst of the aftermath of the bloodbath that took place the last few days in the global stock markets, it is important to take a deep breath and look around for golden opportunities that might shape our future. With the looming food crises due to water issues, environmental challenges and population growth there is a new idea that is taking shape. Ethan Brown, a strapping 6-foot vegan, sold his house in Washington, D.C., and raided his family savings accounts to fund a startup called Beyond Meat because raising livestock is such an inefficient use of land and water, he thought that making soy “chicken” strips and vegetable-protein “Beast” patties would be an even better way to improve the environment than creating fuel cells, the career he abandoned. Along the way he signed up Bill Gates and Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams as investors. It's hard, in fact, to find a tech billionaire who hasn't invested in a protein alternative that aims to stamp out factory farming. Another company Tesla, the electric vehicle company, is creating a new model of disruption, in which products start at the high end and move down. During its 10-year history Tesla has made just 59,500 cars, most of which cost upwards of $100,000. But it expects to introduce a model later this year with a sticker price of about $70,000, and in 2017 it plans to launch one car for $35,000 to create an affordable mass-market electric vehicle that will supplant gasoline-powered cars. All electric vehicles accounted for just 119,710 of the 16.5 million automobiles sold in the US in 2014 — seven tenths of one percent of the market. Established carmakers are paying little attention to electric vehicles not because they're clueless but because so few people want electric vehicles. But they aren't completely ignoring electric vehicles. Consider for example, the all-electric Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, each of which outsold Tesla in 2014. Tesla is betting that preferences will change — that someday millions of people will want electric vehicles. If that happens, researchers believe that GM, Toyota, and others could shift to electric vehicles relatively quickly, using their existing manufacturing capabilities, supplier networks and dealerships to fend off the threat. Industrial 3-D printing is another technology that is at a tipping point, about to go mainstream in a big way. Most executives and many engineers don't realize it, but this technology has moved well beyond prototyping, rapid tooling, trinkets, and toys. “Additive manufacturing” is creating durable and safe products for sale to real customers in moderate to large quantities. It may be hard to imagine that this technology will displace today's standard ways of making things in large quantities. Traditional injection-molding presses, for example, can spit out thousands of widgets an hour. By contrast, people who have watched 3-D printers in action in the hobbyist market often find the layer-by-layer accretion of objects comically slow. But recent advances in the technology are changing that dramatically in industrial settings. Some may forget why standard manufacturing occurs with such impressive speed. Those widgets pour out quickly because heavy investments have been made up front to establish the complex array of machine tools and equipment required to produce them. The first unit is extremely expensive to make, but as identical units follow, their marginal cost plummets. The future is always a product from the imagination and the unexpected.
