bplusd

When Bruce Nussbaum called out the iPhone platform as a pillar to fight recession, and then defended his selection by pointing to Kleiner Perkin’s iFund, he committed a classic error in assessing innovation opportunity: he focused on the elephant, and overlooked the ant.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to visit with an elephant, they are incredible animals. Beyond their sheer mass and unique look, elephants are smart and have complex social lives. And yet, with a global population under a million, their environmental impact is dwarfed by the global contribution of the lowly ant.

Though we rarely pay attention, ants are pretty amazing too. Taking advantage of their size, ants can lift 10-20 times their body mass, and have complex distributed social structures and behavior. Most importantly, ants are almost everywhere. They make up 15-20% of terrestrial animal biomass, and represent an extraordinary volume of ecological activity around the entire planet.

Looking at the innovation landscape, the iPhone looks like a bull elephant charging towards your Land Rover. It’s big. It’s moving fast. It’s unique. It’s novel. And its global economic impact is dwarfed by more mundane, more distributed innovations in sectors like healthcare and environmental products and services.

Like comparing elephants and ants, this is simply a matter of scale. Healthcare in the US is topping 2.25 trillion dollars annually. If you look at the things that green technology touches (food, energy, transport, building, communications, manufacturing, etc. etc.) the scale is similar. As I said before, that’s a heck of a lot of iPhones. In the Serengeti of Silicon Valley, there might even be the market penetration to give the illusion that the iPhone, like the elephant, rules the ecosystem. But that’s just an illusion - for every iPhone, there’s a user who consumes healthcare services and carries a deeply unsustainable footprint.

No one is arguing that the iPhone isn’t significant. It is, and it’s a leading indicator for a sea change in interaction design, from mobile to multitouch. It just pales in comparison to the broader sectors that Nussbaum also singled out for innovation investment. That’s the objection, and focusing on the iPhone might make for good copy, even good VC, but it’s poor economic policy.

Make no mistake - healthcare and the environment are the ants of the innovation landscape. If we’re going to innovate our way out of recession, that’s where to invest.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 11:39 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.