96 into orbit with powerful rockets and engines but which returned to Earth like a glider; the 787 Dreamliner on its first flight in December 2009, the first large commercial jetliner with a mostly composite skin instead of aluminum, bringing more comfort for passengers and efficiency for airlines. That legacy of accomplishing such great things, according to Tracy, would not be possible without an environment where innovation can flourish, where ideas can take flight, where it is OK to fail. And that’s what will drive Boeing’s accomplishments during the next 100 years, he said. “You have to have an environment that encourages people to try new things and where it is OK if something doesn’t work out,” Tracy said. “And the faster you find out if it’s not going to work out, the better you are. And the person should not feel like it’s anything bad for them if one of their ideas doesn’t work out.” There is no picture in Tracy’s office of Dick Fosbury, but perhaps there should be; Tracy mentioned him several times when talking about innovation and how it will drive Boeing’s success during its second century. Fosbury would eventually become a civil engineer, but his most historic achievement came in track and field. He was a high jumper, and a very ordinary one, until the day he tried flinging himself over the bar backward. At the time, high jumpers mainly used two different techniques: the scissors jump, where the athlete threw first one leg and then the other over the bar, and a variant known as the western roll, where the athlete went over the bar facedown. Fosbury kept perfecting his technique, which became known as the Fosbury Flop, and in 1968 he won the Olympic gold medal in high jumping, besting the Olympic record. 2014 CST-100 Starliner spacecraft NASA selects Boeing’s Crew Space Transportation vehicle, known as the CST-100 Starliner, as the next U.S. spacecraft system to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. think could be disruptive, that could radically change our way of business. It could put us out of business; it could put us in a new business.” Tracy said Horizon 3 is typically “the stuff that somebody in a business unit could view as a waste of time because they can’t see a direct link between it and their business. It’s the innovator’s dilemma. The people with an established business have certain things they want you to work on that are key to their business success as they see it. But there are other needs that they aren’t even thinking about that could put them out of business, and we have to be looking at those.” A classic case of a disruptive technology was tiny computer hard drives, he said. “One day, someone asked, ‘What if we could make a hard drive that was only a one-inch square. What could you do with that?’ And out of that was born the iPod.” But another group of companies at the time were making CD changers, Tracy said, and they were wondering how they could fit more CDs into their CD changers. What happened? “They are out of business. Gone,” Tracy said. “And all because when they were asking for a better CD changer someone came along with this tiny hard drive. And that’s what we have to worry about. We must “Everybody jumps that way now,” Tracy said. “He was able to do something that changed the high-jumping world. But I’m sure that the first day he tried it, it was underwhelming. Sometimes big ideas need time to flourish.” And Boeing, too, will continue to do great things during its next 100 years, he added. “But you have to have a place where it is safe to innovate and where the established culture and practices and processes won’t squeeze the life out of new ideas.” Boeing aspires to create that kind of culture—and it has, Tracy said, through various organizations such as Phantom Works, the Product Development group within Commercial Airplanes, and Boeing Research & Technology. He also noted that Boeing has three “bins” of things its engineers are working on. These are known as Horizon 1, Horizon 2 and Horizon 3. It’s important that Boeing invest in all three, or “across the spectrum,” Tracy said. It could be investing in MEMs, or micromechanical machines that print out one atom at a time to make a device on the molecular scale to perform some function, or it could be how to put paint on the next 777X better, Tracy said. “Because you don’t know what the next big thing is, you have to have a portfolio approach where you are investing in a lot of these things,” he said. In the first bin, Horizon 1, are technologies Boeing is working on about six months out, technologies that can affect products that are in production now, or improve the company’s factories, Tracy explained. The Horizon 2 bins are a little further out. And Horizon 3? That’s the “far-out” stuff, Tracy explained. “These are technologies we’re working on that we “You have to have an environment that encourages people to try new things and where it is OK if something doesn’t work out.”
Frontiers July 2016 Issue
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