What if David & Goliath got together?

Richard Canny is a very smart guy when it comes to cars and especially electric vehicles. He’s been a big cheese at Ford as well as CEO of Think, the funky EV company - he has been both David and Goliath.

So when he writes that the smaller electric vehicle companies and the big car manufacturers should consider going into partnership together we should take notice.

We’ve recently seen Modec go under, and soon Londoners won’t be able to buy the G-Whiz anymore. It would be a crying shame if the most pioneering EV brands failed for lack of muscle.

Collaboration – not competition – is fast emerging as the default business operating system for those brands that are shaping the future. I don’t mean collaboration with consumers (like BMW’s new car share scheme) but producer collaboration (like Vattenfall and Volvo) - what we might call ‘upstream collaboration’ - sharing smarts, technology, r&d to forge new businesses and create new categories.

And when the collaborators are David and Goliath the potential is huge – Tesla + Daimler, AOL + Huffington, Green and Blacks + Cadbury, Unilever + Ben & Jerry’s, Will.i.am + Intel, Aardman + Sony, and not forgetting Vice + WPP (the latter conjuring images of Sir Martin Sorrell at a rave).

It’s the new way of doing business.

(Nick Keppel-Palmer)