the
innovative LEDGER
An e-Newsletter from The Innovative Edge™ Inc.
Vol.
7, No. 3 - March 2007
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A
Shining Example of Italian Ingenuity
By Jeff Govendo
I
grew up in Syracuse, NY, a city not known as a place where the sun
shines brightly. People with allergies to sunlight move there. I can
recall many stretches throughout my childhood where we wouldn’t
see the sun for a week, 10 days, perhaps two weeks at a time –
even during the summer. Not surprisingly, it could get pretty depressing.
Imagine,
then, how the people of Viganella, Italy have felt for centuries.
Every year, on exactly November 11, this tiny village situated deep
in a valley in the Italian Alps loses the sun – all day, every
day – for 83 days! Adding insult to injury, the weather doesn’t
even have to be bad for this to happen. It could be a perfectly clear,
cloudless day, yet Viganella would still be swathed in the cold, steely-gray
cover of winter.
This
strange phenomenon occurs when the sun, in its southward migration
with the oncoming winter, disappears behind the mountain summit south
of the town. Its rays can reach a good portion of the mountain
to the north, but not the town itself. As a result, Viganella remains
cold and dark for nearly 3 months. As one of the residents told
a reporter doing a story on the town, "It’s like Siberia
here." (Except Siberia, in fact, gets much more sun!)
But
about three years ago, an architect named Giacomo Bonzani read about
Viganella’s plight and offered his help. His proposed solution
was to strategically place a giant mirror on the slope overlooking
the village in order to reflect the sun’s rays directly onto
the town piazza. Simple in theory, but because it had never been
tried anywhere, the naysayers and doubters shook their heads and said
it couldn’t be done. "Won’t work," they said.
"It'll make the town look fat," others quipped. "What
if a bird leaves droppings on it?" asked one. "How will
that reflect on the town?"
And
on it went. But Bonzani remained unfazed. "I have faith in the
physics," he countered, so convincingly that the townspeople
went ahead and raised the $130,000 (a lot for these peasant villagers;
it took them two years) for the mirror, and the hardware and software
needed to track the sun’s movement.
How
did it work out? This past winter, for the first time in, well…
forever, Viganella was bathed in sunlight (or something like it),
for five hours each day throughout the fall and winter, until February
2 when the real sun returned. As one resident put it, "It made
you want to stop and chat in the square instead of bolting straight
home."
Another
result: lots of visitors from other alpine villages throughout Europe
with the same problem. Said mayor Pier Franco Midali, "More
people have passed through Viganella in the last two months than the
past two centuries."
So
that’s the story of Viganella’s high tech/low tech solution.
High tech because the hardware & software used to follow the sun’s
movement are quite sophisticated. Low tech because the problem was
solved using one of most basic laws of physics: reflected light.
It’s
also a good case study of how easy it is to dismiss a new idea (or
in this case, not really new at all) simply because it hasn’t
been done before. How many ideas are similarly treated in your
organization? Or worse, how many ideas are never even brought up,
for fear they will be dismissed, ridiculed or simply ignored? Multiply
that by the number of organizations across the country, large and
small, where this happens every day, and the cost in terms of lost
ideas – maybe some real breakthroughs – begins to come into
focus.
It’s
something to reflect on.
