Oliver Heiden

When does the fuel cell come? Oliver Heiden

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Department of Political Science), course: Managing Innovation, 36 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "The fuel cell is a higher civilisation performance than the steam engine and will soon banish the Siemens generator into the museum." predicted Wilhelm Ostwald, Nobel price winner for chemistry at the second meeting of the German Electro-technical Society in 1884 in Leipzig. But during more then hundred years passed by in the meantime, the discovery did not turn out to be the 'engine of the future'. This fact raises at least two separate questions in mind. Firstly, why fuel cells did not enter yet the market, and secondly, when do they really supposed to do so? In other terms, when does this hundred years old invention finally become an innovation?