Let’s stick with what we do best.

That sums up the response from top Kodak executives when the company’s own scientists spoke of this amazing new way to snap photos without using film.

Steve Sasson, an engineer at Kodak credited for inventing the first digital camera 40 years ago, recalls being told “that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.”

We know how that story ended. Film production and photo processing was Eastman Kodak’s bread and butter. It chose to stay within that comfort zone and give up what leadership it could have had in the emerging world of digital photography. This assured its demise.

Does the same fate lie ahead for Canadian companies that exist to find, produce, refine, distribute and burn fossil fuels at a time when reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become a moral imperative?

Will zero-carbon technologies and lower-impact business models build new giants of industry and destroy old ones that fail to adapt?

History is littered with companies, even entire industries, blindsided by innovation because they were dismissive of a seemingly distant threat. Streaming and downloads destroyed Blockbuster. Mobile phones killed the pay-phone business. LED lighting has dimmed the future of Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb.

This could explain, at least partially, why 88 per cent of firms on the Fortune 500 in 1955 don’t exist today. Companies such as Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Uber and AirBnB could very well send a few more packing.

“The ability and willingness to think completely out of the box and to see the opportunity in this new energy reality as opposed to the threat, is really what is required,” said Jules Kortenhorst, chief executive of Carbon War Room, a non-profit think tank founded by billionaire Richard Branson.

“For corporate executives who have spent their lives within the constraints of the old model, or for government officials who have seen tax revenue and job creation derived from the old energy reality, it is incredibly hard to make that mental shift.”

Management at both Kodak and Japanese rival Fujifilm both found this shift difficult and both suffered by arriving too late to the digital party. But Fujifilm is thriving today, partly because when it did take action, it did so with the kind of commitment, urgency and long view that Kodak lacked.

One move that paid off, for example, was Fujifilm’s decision to diversify its business beyond photography. Rather than just hunt the world for easy acquisitions, it invested big dollars internally in research and development.

The company did an inventory of its core skills, assets and technological know-how and identified emerging markets where they could be repurposed to capture new revenue.

Fujifilm still sells digital cameras, but is no longer just a photo company. It makes film that goes on solar panels and touch-screen displays, and has made a big push into medical imaging, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Having developed in-house expertise in nanotechnology, the company has reach into dozens of new industries.

Investing to realize this longer-term vision was costly, and it hurt the company’s profitability in the short term, but the effort was worth it. Fujifilm is a highly profitable giant today, with a market value of $21 billion (U.S.). Kodak, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in 2013, is worth $500 million and is still in the red.

With climate change, the stakes are higher, and the challenges much greater, but there are lessons here for 20th-century industries and companies that have built their existence around fossil fuels.

One is that it would be a mistake to underestimate the speed of transition to a low-carbon economy just because previous energy transitions took decades to catch fire.

“We often fall into what we know and view the world by looking to the past,” said Leah Lawrence, CEO of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a federal agency that helps fund emerging clean technologies.

In this case, what the past doesn’t reveal is today’s unprecedented awareness of climate change as a threat to global security, health, biodiversity, food supply and water resources.

The past also doesn’t reflect the dramatic cost declines of clean energy technologies, particularly solar, and the growing political will to start reining in greenhouse-gas emissions.

And past knowns don’t reflect future unknowns — or what writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously called rare and unforeseeable “black swans.”

“Innovation is a very uncertain process,” Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said in a recent interview with The Atlantic, in which he talks of a need for energy miracles. “For all I know, even if we don’t up our R&D, 10 years from now some guy will invent something and it’ll take care of this (climate change) thing.”

You can bet thousands are trying.

For observers such as Kortenhorst, energy miracles are welcome but not necessarily required. There’s plenty of core technology that exists today that could be better, cheaper and scaled up more quickly.

What it requires is a fresh perspective not constrained by an old energy paradigm that sees fossil fuels as a forever fuel — too important to give up, too dominant to challenge, and too big to fail.

An innovation hub such as the Silicon Valley in California doesn’t feel this kind of constraint, Kortenhorst argues.

“The reality within which Silicon Valley looks at energy is, I don’t know anything about energy, but I know all about new business models, and IT-enabled change, and I’m just going to do what I’m going to do at the pace that I want to do it at,” he says.

For established industries — from mining or steelmaking to energy production or agriculture — the message is that sticking with what you do best isn’t always the best path to take when the world around you starts to shift.

Just as likely, it can lead down the road to decline.

Some technologies with the potential to disrupt existing industries:

Indoor Agriculture

Calgary-based Verdant Global has come up with an efficient way to grow vegetables in indoor agrifactories that can be set up anywhere in the world. Its agrifactories use less energy and water, all aspects of growing can be remotely monitored, and yields are up to 20 times higher than conventional greenhouses. Building the factories where food is consumed eliminates the need for transportation and associated greenhouse-gas emissions. “We need to find more scalable, flexible and resource-efficient ways to feed nine billion humans by 2050,” the company says.

Treeless Paper

Prairie Paper, a Winnipeg-based venture cofounded by actor Woody Harrelson, has developed a way to make paper from wheat straw waste using far less energy, water and toxic chemicals, all while reducing the need to cut down trees. A photocopy version of its paper is already sold through Staples, and the company has said its first North American manufacturing plant will be powered by renewable energy. The company is putting pressure on traditional papermakers to explore lower-impact alternatives to what they do.

Garbage Fuel

“Imagine using garbage to fuel your car,” says Montreal-based Enerkem on its website. This company knows how to take waste that can’t be recycled and turn it into renewable chemicals and fuels, such as methanol and ethanol. Its process can handle anything with carbon in it, including wood, plastics, fabrics and paper-based products where no markets existing for recycling. Also, the product it creates can be used locally, such as biofuel for waste disposal trucks. Enerkem’s first commercial facility began operation this year in Edmonton, which was able to boost its waste diversion rate from 60 to 90 per cent. Traditional waste management companies are watching closely.

Powered by Plasma

Vancouver-based General Fusion has come up with a novel way to compress hydrogen isotopes by slamming a metal sphere so hard a shock wave squeezes the plasma inside to the point where a fusion reaction is triggered. A similar reaction happens on our sun, but General Fusion plans to do a mini-reaction every second inside a metal sphere filled with a swirling mix of molten lead and lithium. Bottom line: a lot of heat will be created and captured to produce steam, which will be used to generate plenty of carbon-free electricity. This assumes the company can make it work. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is among a growing list of company funders who have high hopes it can.

View from Mars

Jon Dogterom leads the clean technology practice at Toronto’s Mars Discovery District, where he gets to work closely with dozens of start-up companies advancing on the front lines of the low-carbon economy.

What technology trends have the most disruptive potential when it comes to tackling greenhouse-gas emissions?

One of the most disruptive trends we’re seeing is really this convergence of different technology fields. For example, clean technology converging with information technology is opening up whole new areas of operational improvement for companies and new business models at the same time.

Can you give an example of this convergence in action?

An example would be the Ecobee or Nest smart thermostats, both of which are opening up a whole new business model for utilities and at the same time providing new capabilities to the homeowner. The ability to control your home energy use remotely, or in the future to pass that control to your utility or the grid operator under certain conditions, is one instance where combining IT with physical hardware opens up new possibilities. If you can control thousands of home thermostats at the same time then you could potentially avoid needing a natural gas peaking plant.

Does this fundamentally change the role of the utility?

For sure. If they don’t evolve over time, then large portions of their business are going to be displaced by other people. That’s why you’ve got utilities like PowerStream running a project that puts stationary batteries in a number of homes. The company can actually control the charge or the usage of those home battery systems remotely. That creates a new relationship between the utility and the homeowner.

What other disruptions are on the horizon?

Another area where we see amazing innovation is on the materials side and the processing of materials in a way that fundamentally changes their characteristics. Smarter alloys are an example. A company called NanoQuan has a way of mixing composites so you can tune the characteristics of a material. This can improve the efficiency of what you are doing, potentially allowing less of a material to be used for achieving the same function.

What challenges lie ahead?

Where industry struggles the most is keeping up with the pace of change and making sure they are part of that change. The biggest challenge here is breaking down past silos to allow innovation to happen across industries in a smoother way. That requires groups to work together that don’t normally work together. It’s not very often, for example, that the transportation sector would be talking to electric utilities, and that’s happening now with the introduction of electric vehicles.

This article is part of a series produced in partnership by the Toronto Star and Tides Canada to address a range of pressing climate issues in Canada leading up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, December 2015. Tides Canada is supporting this partnership to increase public awareness and dialogue around the impacts of climate change on Canada’s economy and communities. The Toronto Star has full editorial control and responsibility to ensure stories are rigorously edited in order to meet its editorial standards.

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