What the EV Industry’s Challenges Reveal About Innovation and Regulation

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many consumers are buying electric vehicles, thanks to sportscar-like performance, government incentives, and personal motivations to minimize climate change. But the EV industry overall has revved and sputtered in unpredictable ways and offers a case study in managing innovation, regulation, and competition. Mike Colias, deputy bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal, explains the complex landscape that incumbents such as GM and Ford and start-ups like Tesla find themselves in. Through stories of iconic industry executives and bold competitive moves, he shares insights that leaders in every industry can learn from. Colias wrote the new book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the HBR Idea cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:14.0	I'm Kurt Nickyff.
0:25.7	Innovation often happened slowly and then all at once.
0:28.9	That's the felt reality of disruptive innovation.
0:31.7	Basically, if a big company doesn't watch out,
0:35.2	a startup can come in with a new inferior offering.
0:39.8	Ignored long enough, that upstart can improve its product and eventually,
0:47.2	seemingly suddenly, put the incumbent out of business. That phenomenon is well understood now.
0:53.4	What's hard is getting the timing right. You move too quickly to the new tech, and customers aren't there yet. You're out of luck.
0:56.1	Wait too long. Someone else eats your lunch. Even when established companies recognize disruptive
1:02.2	innovations and deliberately bring them on, it's a complex balancing act to transition to business
1:08.3	for the future. Case in point, actually cases in point,
1:13.1	electric vehicles. The car industry is bursting with disruptive innovation case studies in the
1:19.1	making. And you'll find many of them to learn from in the new book, Inevitable, inside the messy,
1:25.4	unstoppable transition to electric vehicles. The author is Mike
1:29.4	Kallias, Deputy Bureau Chief at the Wall Street Journal, and he joins us now. Hi, Mike.
1:35.2	Hi, Kurt. Thanks for having me on.
1:41.8	It's such a fascinating industry, right, companies amazing brands this consumer technology that we all
1:49.6	totally get and are totally familiar with a lot of emotion and economics involved and then you've got
1:55.6	electric vehicle technology you've got like driverless automation technology, it's just a really
2:02.5	amazing business. But I think maybe we should set the scene here. Why do customers buy electric
2:08.1	vehicles? Like what do companies know that they're looking for? Yeah, we've seen this evolution
	...

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