TL; DR

It* was a big week for "powered lift," e.g., air taxis and delivery drones. And it taught us something about credible innovation, mainly:

It takes looooong. And just because CEOs, investors, and innovators don't like it, reality/ the universe doesn't care.

*(meaning the week of Oct. 21, 2024)

The story

Two big stories stood out in the world of "powered lift" flight, a category of aircraft that has elements of both planes and helicopters and includes air taxis, delivery drones, and more.

For one thing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) published its final rules for powered lift operations. Geek speak aside, this is "the final piece in the puzzle ... for introducing these aircraft in the near term." It's go time!

Meanwhile, over in Europe, the German government blew up funding for powered lift startup Lilium, headquartered near Munich. By canceling a 100M Euro loan that was almost–but not quite–agreed, it caused conditions for further state funding to blow up too. The loss-making company declared bankruptcy within days.

All of it came a full decade after after Amazon first focused the world's attention on powered lift with their announcement of "Amazon Prime Air" (which itself took five years to get its initial Air Worthiness Certificate on an exception basis).

[Source: FAA (2024). BR24 Redaktion (2024). Wikipedia.]

The point for doing credible innovation work

The key points

Let's simplify it into a simple timeline:

In 2014, Amazon Prime Air is announced. It takes 5 years even to get regulatory approval on an exception basis. Then it takes another five years for the FAA to finish creating regulations. Even then, the technology is still so untested and expensive that bigger aircraft, like the powered lift air taxies that Lilium wants to produce, are still 1 - 3 years out from flying and have sucked up so much money that a company goes belly-up within days of not getting massive new cash infusions.

That's a loooooong time.

The implication

In other words, serious, credible innovation leaders may have a choice: Either be "new to the world," "disruptive," on "some of the world's hardest problems," etc. ... or get to market anywhere close to a timeline that satisfies public company investors, boards, and executives.

Or, simpler: Humans are notorious for massive over-optimism and terrible at estimating how long things will take and how hard it'll be. Only companies with an appetite for extremely long timelines have a shot at this kind of work.

The silver lining

Am I just offering doom and gloom? No.

You can be both fast and disruptive. You "just" have to fold timelines and front-load value. Of course, this completely breaks orthodox innovation methods. So it's not as easy as a "just." But it happens all the time, including in famous case studies. You just have to be willing to face the reality of it.

What case studies? The clichéd one is Netflix:

Netflix did not offer streamed movies for a long time. It was just not "adjacent possible" in a desirable, viable, feasible, and acceptable way. Instead, they shipped DVDs at first, only putting the ordering mechanism online. That model was still hard but possible.

You, too, can do it.

One fairly simple start: Skip standard approaches to Design Thinking and Lean Startup. They may start with an "MVP" (minimum viable product), but that MVP is typically for something futuristic.

Instead, create your first MVP as normal and then, after confirming initial Desirability (especially after confirming the problem), iterate on the solution to create a more realistic version that will give you the 20% most important value with 80% less effort. Do not go on to building out a higher-resolution version of the fancy futuristic thing you had in mind. Less exciting. But you have a more credible chance at seeing a roadmap come to life that eventually will come back to your original but way-too-futuristic idea.

T.I.S.C.

Footnotes

Original stories

🇺🇸🇬🇧🇮🇳🇦🇺 English auto-translation (for your convenience, not guaranteed for accuracy):

🇩🇪 Original German Stories:

Credits

Photo "Mavic pro on YuLong mountain" by Iewek Gnos on Unsplash

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