141 desIgn 141 IdeatIon . . . furniture buyers picked up components in fl at pack form from a large warehouse and assembled the products themselves in their homes? What is common practice today was unthinkable until IKEA introduced the concept in the 1960s. . . . airlines didn’t buy engines for their airplanes, but paid for every hour an engine runs? That is how Rolls-Royce transformed itself from a money-losing British manufacturer into a service fi rm that today is the world’s second biggest provider of large jet engines. . . . voice calls were free worldwide? In 2003 Skype launched a service that allowed free voice calling via the Internet. After fi ve years Skype had acquired 400 million registered users who collectively had made 100 billion free calls. . . . car manufacturers didn’t sell cars, but provided mobility services? In 2008 Daimler launched car2go, an experimental business in the German city of Ulm. Car2go’s fl eet of vehicles allows users to pick up and drop off cars anywhere in the city, paying by- the-minute fees for mobility services. . . . individuals could lend money to each other rather than borrowing from banks? In 2005, U.K.-based Zopa launched a peer-to-peer lending platform on the Internet. . . . every villager in Bangladesh had access to a telephone? That is what Grameenphone set out to achieve under a partnership with micro-fi nance institution Grameen Bank. At the time, Bangladesh still had the world’s lowest tele-density. Today Grameenphone is Bangladesh’s largest taxpayer. bmgen_final.indd 141 6/15/10 5:40 PM