MyScience.ie

While some people may think that if you want to rise to the top you need to be in the world of corporate finance. The guys at Honda have other thoughts on their mind as can be seen in a recent feature in Forbes magazine which we spotted courtesy of MAKE.

A few snippets from the feature are almost reminiscent of Google in terms of the amount of spinoffs that Honda is associated with. Other than its core competency in the automobile industry, the company is also involved in robotics and agriculture to name, but a few. Honda is also run by an engineer, a discipline which is highly valued within the organisation. Not simply because they need engineers to develop good cars, but also because the engineering problems its staff encounters on a daily basis has lead to new offerings and ultimately new revenue streams.

Here’s a snapshot of the feature. Trust us the full article is well worth the read:

Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn’t brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan. An inveterate tinkerer, Honda also set up a center nearby to develop better soybean varieties and improve agricultural processes.

This is from a company that sold 21 million internal combustion engines for cars, motorcycles, lawnmowers and boats last year. But there’s nothing Honda hates more than waste, and there is nothing Honda likes more than an engineering problem. Indeed, how else to explain why Honda has studied the maddeningly evasive cockroach (for anticollision technology), decoded the rice genome (to increase crop yields and create more-productive crops for biofuels) and developed a robot that can get instructions by reading human brain waves (to learn how machines and humans can better coexist).

Honda’s engineering obsessions have the Japanese company better prepared than perhaps any other automaker for high oil prices and roiled energy markets. Most auto companies have placed big bets on one or two alternative propulsion technologies while they dabble or play catch-up in others. General Motors, for example, has focused on fuel cells, Toyota on hybrids, DaimlerChrysler on diesels. Honda, the world’s eighth-biggest automaker, has developed a panoply of technologies: hybrids, fuel cells, clean diesels, natural gas vehicles and the world’s most sophisticated mass-market gasoline engines. It even announced in July it will sell a small, fuel-efficient jet.