Innovations: Eureka! by Nik Blosser - 9.1.07
The August 2007 issue of National Geographic magazine was shrink-wrapped in a petroleum-based film that packaged up the issue with a DVD titled “Eureka.” It was labeled at the bottom “A Shell Films Production.” On the DVD was a nine-minute film about a Shell oil engineer from the Netherlands who, according to the copy on the back, “is passionate about saving the world’s energy resources,” and who “struggles to solve the problem of leaving ‘undrillable’ oil behind.”
My kids will watch anything on TV, so I popped in the DVD and we watched it together. It was an engaging story with very expensive production values — shooting in multiple countries, use of helicopters and oil platforms, etc.
But let me save you nine minutes: The engineer was sharing a milkshake with his teenage son when the son took his straw out and bent the end to a 90 degree angle so the straw could reach every corner of the bulbous milkshake glass and suck up all the previously “undrillable” ice cream. This inspired the engineer to create flexible drills. The parent and teenage son bonded. More oil that “would just be lying there” is now drillable. Everyone’s happy. What a great story.
In my last column, I wrote about how the British ended the Atlantic slave trade 200 years ago at an estimated cost to their GNP similar to the cost economists estimate we would bear if we as a country seriously addressed the challenge of global warming. I wrote how in addition to great leadership, a vocal public comprising hundreds of thousands of citizens protested over many years, including boycotting Caribbean sugar. It has been curious to me why there really is no similar sense of urgency among the general public in the United States now, and it seems unlikely that there will be. Why is that the case? In short, I believe, it is because of things like “Eureka.”
One profession that has grown amazingly sophisticated over the past century is that of public relations and communications. Global companies care a great deal about their brand, and they measure attitudes toward it regularly.
In my last column, I wrote about how the British ended the Atlantic slave trade 200 years ago at an estimated cost to their GNP similar to the cost economists estimate we would bear if we as a country seriously addressed the challenge of global warming. I wrote how in addition to great leadership, a vocal public comprising hundreds of thousands of citizens protested over many years, including boycotting Caribbean sugar. It has been curious to me why there really is no similar sense of urgency among the general public in the United States now, and it seems unlikely that there will be. Why is that the case? In short, I believe, it is because of things like “Eureka.”
