The Comedy Central show Nathan For You stars University of Victoria business graduate Nathan Fielder as he goes around helping small businesses with out-of-box ideas. Nathan For You has quickly become a cult-classic and not just with those interested in business and marketing.

The ingenuity of his ideas as he tries to finesse the system allow for great TV while simultaneously teaching the viewer about marketing and business. The way in which he goes about solving businesses’ problems tackle commercial issues, a recent one being disruptive innovations.

Fielder has been able to accomplish news-worthy results with his ideas. It is not only Fielder’s new take on marketing that is so special about the show, it is also the brief lessons about business he learns from his projects, as was mentioned by this Hit & Run blog.

For instance, a few years prior, Nathan comes up with the idea for a struggling taxi company to offer free rides for pregnant woman. By doing so, he hopes that one will give birth in the taxi and garner large amounts of positive publicity for the company.

However, just a few weeks ago, an episode aired in which Nathan attempts to take down Uber for offering free onesies for women who give birth in an Uber.

Convinced they were stealing his idea, Nathan sets out to take them down by creating a sleeper cell of bad drivers ready to give bad Uber services. In addition, he makes an anonymous threat video asking them to remove their onesie offer.

Unfortunately, Nathan was ultimately not able defeat Uber. At the end of the episode, he states that:

“The free market had again chosen a winner. The real enemy wasn’t Uber. It was progress.”

Not only does this teach the viewer about disruptive innovation, it also teaches how powerless businesses are to disruptive innovations. When there is enough progress in an industry to result in a completely new industry, there is very little a business can do except to adapt and try to keep up with innovation.

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People always want what makes their lives immediately easier. When it comes to maximizing your current, instant happiness, it’s quite easy to disregard the long-term impacts of your decisions.

That’s why available technology such as supersonic planes that are reportedly coming back according to Sabina Popescu’s blog into the mainstream air-travel service may cause more harm than good. The planes, which are extremely fast and heavily reduce travel time, have been under construction to mitigate the noise pollution they caused in the past. Instead, they wish to offer high speed travel without all the previous drawbacks.

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/boom-supersonic-plane-virgin-space-company/index.html

One of the shortcomings of a supersonic plane that is not being avidly talked about is the environmental impact such a plane would have. Regular-speed air travel is already quite detrimental, so can you imagine a plane with double the power?

MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment (LAE) has been tasked with conducting such research about the environmental implications of supersonic planes:

“Areas of scientific and technical investigation will include the potential for ozone depletion from high altitude emissions, the effects of any ozone depletion on human ultraviolet radiation exposure – which increases risk of skin cancer – and the impact of supersonic flights on the climate, including effects on high altitude condensation trails.”

-LAE Website, 2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3512232/Boom-time-incredible-planes-bring-new-era-supersonic-travel-one-reaching-speed-12-000mph.html

If the results of LAE’s research is found to be negative, I truly hope airplane manufacturers do not continue with the supersonic plane production and subsequent use. Stakeholder theory suggests that the environment is also a factor we must consider in our decisions. The aforementioned health and environmental issues potentially involved are quite serious and permanent, and I feel it would be unwise to overlook them for the sake of efficiency and short-term satisfaction.

It is our duty as consumers to understand the impacts of modern-day innovations before being in favor of them, as often the more serious drawbacks are not what is advertised in news articles and other media outlets. While we all enjoy efficiency, we must place more value on global issues than on individual personal pleasure.

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