Zomeworks corporation: design driven innovation
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(2) Page 2. 9B13M137. Abstract for promotional use only. Full version available at www.iesep.com. Over the years, Baer and Zomeworks had sought to clarify for the public the meaning of solar policy and technology, both active and passive solar. Through a series of essays, Baer had waged a withering critique against active solar energy policy while simultaneously promoting passive solar energy technology. In one essay on the meaning of solar subsidies, Baer had written: One of the worst features of the tax credits is that the public is not investing its money in efficiency such as using better insulation or more carefully designed homes . . . . The point of subsidies for solar energy has been to correct an imbalance, to prevent people from squandering fossil fuels by bribing them to use solar equipment. But you can’t arrange enough bribes to modify the behavior on all the fronts where oil and the sun compete. The only possible way to do that is to raise the price of the competing fossil fuels by eliminating subsidies to fossil fuels or ceasing to allow businesses to write them off as an expense. If using fossil fuels is wrong, then the price of doing so must be raised — not a series of bribes arranged to lure people away from a few scattered uses. The sense of this is wrong.1 A deeper meaning of Zomeworks’ products was that they presented society with a decreased dependence on high technology, and therefore a more direct relationship with the sun and the natural world. The firm designed and manufactured passive solar equipment that ran autonomously for years, without electric or fossil fuel power, and with little or no maintenance. In spite of such performance, passive solar technology remained stuck in the early stages of the technology lifestyle. This situation made Baer particularly interested in man’s relationship with technology. He frequently spoke of the spell that high technology cast over society, and how we continued to commit “the crime of obedience to the machine.” In an interview, Baer had opined: The public doesn’t understand that they can passively heat and cool their houses with the sun in the day and ventilation at night. The institutions, like television networks, are making us live under a spell that we can’t take care of ourselves. You look to General Electric to solve your problems, or British Petroleum or Dutch Shell or somebody who makes some high-tech device that is subsidized.2 Said another way, we were biased in favor of high technology to the exclusion of other forms of technology, and we believed ourselves unable to do anything without the aid of high technology. In that sense, high technology disempowered us. Baer saw this as an evolutionary threat to the survival of our species, not just in terms of things like weapons of mass destruction but also in terms of our basic connection with the natural world. We were so enamored with high technology that we had lost touch with our individual humanity. The cause of this mentality was mysterious. Might it have been due to the increasing disconnect between contemporary society and the natural world? In 1800, 90 per cent of the population worked on farms. In 1900, the number was 41 per cent. In 2012, that number was two per cent. An integrally related theme of Zomeworks was individual empowerment and self-reliance. When Zomeworks’ products decreased one’s dependence on high technology, they simultaneously increased one’s independence in the world. It was no coincidence that a large percentage of Zomeworks’ customers were seeking to move “off the grid,” if they had not already done so. Yet these customers exclusively bought either the firm’s passive tracker in order to generate their own electricity, or one of its skylighting systems. Sales languished for the other products such as thermosiphon-type solutions for passive cooling, and passive tracker-based daylighting systems, and solar water heaters. For some reason, the off-the-grid customer’s concept of self-reliance was limited to self-generated electricity, and did not extend to more direct, non-electrical uses of the sun. Research engineer Kevin Tan attributed the general lack of interest in developed nations in solar energy to their well-developed infrastructure. Why become self-sufficient, when the infrastructure was so dependable?. Distributed by IESE Publishing. If you need copies, please contact us: www.iesep.com. All rights reserved..
(3) Page 3. 9B13M137. Abstract for promotional use only. Full version available at www.iesep.com. The Firm’s History Baer started Zomeworks in 1969 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the intent of building zonohedral domes or “Zomes.”3 Many first learned about Steve Baer and Zomeworks through his dome-building activities at Drop City4 (1965—early 1970s) near Trinidad, Colorado; through his books Dome Cookbook (1968) and Zome Primer (1970); and through an article in the Whole Earth Catalogue (1969) telling how to make domes from triangles and rhombohedrons chopped out of car tops with an axe. The firm soon expanded into passive solar design. In the 1970s, it sold insulated self-operating louvers (Skylid), moveable insulation (Beadwall), reflector shades (Sunbender), and passive solar water heaters (Big Fin absorbers and Bread Box batch water heaters). In the 1980s, it added passive solar trackers for photovoltaics (Track Rack), which continued to be the most popular Zomeworks product. In the 1990s, it began selling temperature-regulating enclosures (Cool Cell) for technologies such as batteries. In 2007, it began constructing houses with absorbers on the south-facing walls for winter heating and a metal collector roof (Snap Cap) for summer cooling. THE BRANDS. The early history of Zomeworks supported a brand identity steeped in the mythology of the rugged individual. Baer’s work began in the 1960s, during which time it enjoyed considerable resonance with the hippie counterculture as evidenced by his participation in Drop City. What likely animated that resonance was the match between the desire of the “Droppers” to escape contemporary culture, and the eccentricity and versatility of Baer’s Zomes. Baer championed a more natural way to live; stated otherwise, he advocated a “cultural innovation”5 in the form of a better ideology (cultural innovation focuses primarily on delivering radically new cultural expressions and secondarily on radically new technologies, though it can additionally, albeit secondarily, provide these new technologies). The alternative ideology that Baer offered was radically new and better in the sense that it sought to empower by reducing our dependence on societal infrastructure and by restoring our sense of ourselves as natural (rather than technological) beings. It brought to mind the term “natural energy,” analogous to “natural foods.” Just as Innocent Drinks “championed the pre-industrial purity of ‘only fruit,’”6 Baer seemed to champion the pre-industrial purity of “only sun,” without wires and electricity and tax credits and subsidies (which are the moral equivalents of preservatives and synthetic ingredients7). Baer sought to replace electrical heating and cooling with solar thermal heating and cooling. He sought to replace electrical lighting with daylighting systems that used mirrors to reflect the sun off the ceiling. Zomeworks eventually rebranded the firm without the implicit Steve Baer brand. The rebranding was apparently intended to reposition Zomeworks from a countercultural player to a corporate supplier (the firm’s website, www.zomeworks.com, had no links to Baer’s personal website, www.taxshine.com). Previously, Baer had been the brand personality, comprising a level 3 brand, and the new Zomeworks brand lacked a brand personality and stood at level 2.8 The Customers. Many of Zomeworks’ customers found the firm through their own independent research, rather than through advertising. Purchasers of Zomeworks products were usually highly inquisitive and became loyal return buyers. The firm considered its new and returning customers to be its most valuable asset.. Distributed by IESE Publishing. If you need copies, please contact us: www.iesep.com. All rights reserved..
(4) Page 4. 9B13M137. Firm Operations. Corporate Outside investors owned more than 50 per cent of the firm. Several years ago a business manager had been hired, but the result had been unsatisfactory and the experiment had never been repeated. Baer’s wife Holly, formerly chief financial officer, took over as president after Baer’s stroke in 2009. The key personnel are listed in Exhibit 2.. Abstract for promotional use only. Full version available at www.iesep.com. R&D Steve Baer, founder and president of Zomeworks, led R&D to design the firm’s elegant products that were based on a deep and practical understanding of passive solar phenomena. To some extent, the firm’s R&D process was one of “accidental discovery” (see Exhibit 1). For example, in one interview Baer stated: We were making sun-trackers for photovoltaic panels. Then a guy in Tucson told us there was a problem with batteries at telecommunications sites getting too hot and it shortened their life. So I started fooling around with figuring out how to make a battery cabinet that would remove the heat building up. We built metal boxes that had water circulating in the lid. At night it would give heat off to the sky. The cooled water would flow back into a tank in the box and cool the batteries.9 This accidental discovery, however, was grounded in the firm’s vision of a no-nonsense relationship with the sun, for Zomeworks was a design-driven organization. Baer was a prolific writer, writing often against tax credits and subsidies, such as in his book Subsidizing the Sun: A Collection of Essays and Letters, or on his website, www.taxshine.com (“Remember sunshine and tax shine are different.”). In an unpublished letter to the editor of Newsweek, Baer wrote: We are giving up traditional uses of the sun such as … clothes lines and windows for lighting and heating buildings. Instead we have subsidized wind generators and photovoltaic panels. How is the state bent on force feeding solar electricity into the electric grid and solar ethanol into our gas tanks, while millions of our children … don’t get enough to eat? Baer also used “The Clothesline Paradox” to illustrate how technology tax credits and subsidies could discourage good house design: If you take down your clothes line and buy an electric clothes dryer the electric consumption of the nation rises slightly. If you go in the other direction and remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is no credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs to solar energy which is now drying the clothes! ... If you drive a motorcycle, the gasoline you consume appears in the nation’s energy budget. If you get a horse to ride and graze the horse on range nearby, the horse’s energy which you use does not appear in anyone’s energy accounting.10 (In other words, the state subsidized high technology, but gave no rewards to those who saved energy by using the sun naturally as a source of heat and light.) Bearing witness to this “mistreatment of the sun” was one of the themes of Zomeworks, whose products “are intended for places where one otherwise must heat with expensive propane or electricity.”11 With the sale of the passive trackers and fixed racks, Zomeworks was part of the photovoltaic industry; however, it also sought to facilitate traditional uses of the sun in addition to “having the sun imitate coal” (that is, using unprocessed sunlight itself for light and. Distributed by IESE Publishing. If you need copies, please contact us: www.iesep.com. All rights reserved..
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