The Fringestream

Throughout history, a combination of timing, economic need, and innovation has served to take certain fringe ideas into the mainstream. It’s the entrepreneur’s mission to discern which fringe ideas are set to go mainstream and to invest accordingly.

In 1911, for example, First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, decided the British navy should switch from coal to oil.

“Oil-powered ships would be faster, would require fewer men to operate the engine rooms, would allow for greater radius of action, and could be refuelled if necessary, at sea,” explains Jeremy Rifkin in the book The Hydrogen Economy.

It was a risky move, given that coal was dominant at the time and oil was still something of a fringe fuel.

In 1912, British government took Churchill’s advice and built a few oil-powered battleships. Soon, all new ships around the world were designed to run on oil, not coal. The move from coal to oil was hastened on land by the advent of the internal combustion engine in cars. Oil would soon supplant coal as the dominant heat and energy source of the 20th Century.

Skip forward a century, and now it’s King Oil that’s under challenge.  

On January 21, 2010, the government of Ontario signed a deal with a consortium led by Korean corporate giant, Samsung, to build wind towers and solar energy facilities. The deal is worth $7 billion and will generate 16,000 new jobs and clean energy for over half-a-million households, says the province.

If Churchill’s advocacy marked the mainstream embrace of oil, the province of Ontario’s deal did the same for renewable energy. Thanks to the Samsung contract, renewable energy went from being a punch-line to a serious business proposition in Canada. 

Environmentalism itself used to be a fringe idea – something only hippies and Luddites worried about. Today, major companies trip over themselves to prove how “green” they are.

The Internet was another fringe idea, an obscure play-toy for academics from the time of its invention in 1969, right up until the mid-1990s. Then, the World Wide Web and graphics pushed the net into the mainstream.

Just as oil usurped coal, the once fringe Internet also threatens to topple corporate giants. Napster and other file-sharing services have shattered the complacent record industry and forced a total rethink about how music is sold and distributed. The Internet has proven equally devastating to traditional newspapers and magazines.  

There’s no shortage of other concepts that have made the journey from fringe to mainstream: Mountain biking, for one, was invented by a handful of bored teenagers in California in the 1970s. Now it’s one of the most popular cycling sports in the world.

Likewise, alternative medicine – in the form of herbs, vitamins, ointments, tonics, and therapeutic massage – was once the province of eccentrics and health cranks. Now, Shoppers Drug Mart offers an entire section devoted to natural health products. Organic food has undergone the same transition, from hippie grub to something found in Loblaws and other major grocery stores.

Here’s a list of contemporary fringe ideas that might make the leap to the mainstream in the near-future: natural lawns (lots of native plants and wildflowers, no sod, pesticides or chemical fertilizer), raw food (uncooked and unprocessed), a male birth control pill, green coffee beans, electronic cigarettes and a flat tax.

Make the right investments now and you might end up as rich as a 20th Century oil baron or an Internet CEO in the late 1990s.

Image courtesy stock.xchng.