BlaBlaCar: Lessons From the Shipping Container

European Straits #24

Dear all,

I just spent 6 days on the RMS Queen Mary 2 crossing the Atlantic: Southampton, Cherbourg, Saint-Nazaire, New York City. The event I participated in on the ship was called ‘The Bridge’: it was designed to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of US involvement in World War One with a series of conferences and workshops around the future of business.

The Queen Mary 2, a magnificent British Cunard liner (built in Saint-Nazaire), radiated the past splendor of the British Empire. And in her elegant “Chart Room” and “Commodore Club”, no reading seemed more appropriate than one about innovation and the ocean: Marc Levinson’s The Box, which narrates the invention of containers and the revolution that ensued.

The book got me thinking about the complex, adverse relationship between regulation and innovation. Next Saturday I will be in Aix-en-Provence for the Rencontres économiques, which is a kind of French equivalent of the World Economic Forum, with CEOs, politicians, and economists gath…