I saw the Yamaha electric scooter, the Pocke, in a store window. It goes 20 mph and will get 40 hours on a charge. I can’t figure out where it would be used. It really doesn’t do much more than an electric bicycle.
But my imagination isn’t the issue. This electric scooter from Yamaha is part of the answer to my Japan Quest … the source of commercial creativity. This is intrapreneuring a term created by my good friend Gifford Pinchot to describe entrepreneurs inside corporations.
Yamaha, like most other big technically based Japanese corporations, brings almost any idea their engineers have to market. They let the market test new ideas. In most of the world, entrepreneurs have to raise money, build and market their own products. In Japan they just have to sell a new products manager.