Ford Motor Company has embarked on a mission known within the company as the “Piquette Project”.


Named after Ford's famed Piquette Avenue factory in Detroit where the Model T was developed nearly a century ago -- the efford was launched last year by Chairman and CEO Bill Ford Jr. as part of his campaign to revive the company's spirit of innovation.   


"The goal is to help us do with products what we did with manufacturing at the Rouge Plant," said Ford spokesman Jon Pepper, referring to the $2 billion environmentally friendly makeover of the Dearborn industrial complex.


Pepper said Ford hopes to show some of the first fruits of the Piquette Project by 2008, the 100-year anniversary of the Model T.


Bill Ford's goal is nearly as ambitious: develop renewable, clean and safe vehicles that would be both socially conscious and provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace.


By the middle of last year, Ford had assembled a group of what Pepper described as "the best thinkers in our company." They were given a clean sheet of paper and told to tackle the tough issues of environmental sustainability, novel design and engineering and passenger safety.


Using a "war room" inside Ford's world headquarters in Dearborn, the team began meeting in early summer under the direction of Tim O'Brien, vice president of corporate relations; Gerhard Schmidt, vice president of research and advanced engineering; Nancy Gioia, director of sustainable mobility technologies and hybrids; and William McDonough, an environmental consultant instrumental in developing the new Dearborn Truck Plant at the Rouge Complex.


The existence of the Piquette Project was first revealed by Time magazine on its Web site. Bill Ford and his efforts to turn around Ford are the subject of a cover story reaching newsstands this week.


"Piquette helps institutionalize innovation," Bill Ford told Time. "My goal is to fight Toyota and everybody else and come out on top."


Rival Toyota Motor Corp. also has made mitigating the automobile's impact on the environment a central goal of its advanced research efforts.


"Bill Ford was talking about that issue long before Toyota was," Pepper said.