After its disastrous American foray, Daimler is thinking more radically

IT WAS July 4th 2007 and Jerome Guillen had spent America’s independence day climbing Mount Hood in Oregon. Back at his car, he found a voice-mail message: Dieter Zetsche, the head of Daimler, wanted to meet him urgently. When the Frenchman, then in charge of the design of a new American truck for the German carmaker, saw his boss, he was asked his thoughts on setting up an innovation unit to generate additional growth. A few days later he was given the job.

The meeting came at an important time for Daimler, which had just extracted itself from a disastrous merger with Chrysler that had sapped its creativity and damaged its Mercedes-Benz brand. Before long, recession would add to its troubles. But adversity made the company more willing to embrace some of the odder ideas that Mr Guillen and his team came up with—especially those that ran against the longstanding conventional wisdom that the way for carmakers to grow is to encourage people to buy more cars. …