Bill Ford told The Detroit News in a recent interview that when doing something different — like skunkworks is — isolation can be beneficial for getting the work done quickly, secretively and creatively.

"Particularly as they're starting off, there's something to be said for separation," he said. "We're a big company that people like to poke around. I think (Ford CEO) Jim (Farley) really wanted them to be left alone. It's probably no more complicated than that. Now, at some point, a lot of what they're doing will have to be integrated back into bigger Ford, and you'll start to see them coming together. But for now, particularly in the early, early days, it was important for them to not be bothered by curious Ford visitors. Even Jim and I had to sort of rein ourselves in from going out there all the time, because we don't want to distract them."

It's far from the first time Ford has taken the approach of isolating a small group when it's seeking to do something different. Farley told The News that the all-electric Mustang Mach-E SUV, Ford's first mass-market EV, came from "Team Edison" that had worked in a building called The Factory in Corktown even before the automaker bought the train station.

"We purposely moved them away from Dearborn to start the EV business, and so was our whole mobility business," Farley said.

Damian Porcari, the former director of licensing at Ford Global Technologies LLC that manages the automaker's intellectual property, previously worked on a skunkworks-style team for the 2015 Mustang GT. Its members isolated in the basement of the company's product development center.

"Large institutions are not the most helpful ways of generating new ideas, especially when they've been doing the same thing for 100-plus years," said Porcari, who also is the former director in the Midwest of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "You get way more noes than yeses."

In that way, privacy is more than just keeping the details under lock from the competition or the public, but even from finance and legal teams, he said: "Very few cars owe their existence to lawyers."

That's the contrast between traditional manufacturers and the startup automakers that have taken over the world's largest automotive market in China, said Jeff Stout, executive director of global innovation at Shanghai-based Yanfeng International Auto Tech Co. Ltd. The supplier has found domestic Chinese automakers are more willing to give innovations a try and do so more quickly, allowing Yanfeng to roll out new technologies and obtain the data and performance results it needs to pitch the product to other customers.

"You don't have the same kind of bureaucracy," Stout said.

Need for agility

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