Glomar Explorer - Lessons for Commercializing Innovation from a Cold War Spy Story

Today, we’re diving into one of the most bizarre - and instructive - business case studies you’ve probably never heard about. It’s a Cold War spy story. It’s a billion-dollar engineering feat. And it’s also a cautionary tale about innovation, market strategy, and the fatal mistake of copying your competition.

In the early 1970s, Hughes Industries unveiled the Glomar Explorer, a futuristic ship supposedly built to mine manganese nodules from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. The world watched. And some of the biggest companies - Lockheed, INCO, Royal Dutch Shell - scrambled to launch their own deep-sea mining operations.

There was just one problem: none of it was real!