A formula for innovation?

The notion that you build and run racing cars for the benefit of today’s motorists is about as convincing as the idea that you send people to the Moon so that you can build a better frying pan. It turns out, though, that Formula 1 motor racing may have a point beyond its ‘benefit’ to TV, advertising and makers of champagne. (Such a waste.)

A recent report from the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) looks into “how the successful introduction of innovation in motorsport is organised and managed”.

The report, Racing For Radical Innovation: How motorsport companies harness network diversity for discontinuous innovation, tells us that motor racing is not small beer. It has an annual turnover of £6 billion, exports worth £3.6 billion and supports 38,500 full and part-time jobs, 25,000 of them engineers. Motorsport and performance engineering is, they say, “one of the UK’s industrial success stories”.

But trouble is just around the corner. Professor Rick Delbridge of the Cardiff Business School, who did the research behind the report, warns that “innovation activity is under extreme pressure. Regulation changes, increased concerns with costs, and limits to exploration and networking for knowledge creation are undermining the innovativeness of motorsport firms.”

The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) wants to slash the budgets that companies can dedicate to each year’s new Formula 1 racing cars. One consequence might be to slow down the pace of innovation. But there are lessons we can draw from all the money that has already gushed into making faster cars.

The report, tells us that there really are some “innovations which have their origins in the motorsport industry” – things like “carbon fibre wheel-chairs, non-slip boots, hi-tech fishing line and the influence of pit-stop crews on the efficient transferral of patients from the operating theatre to intensive care”.

Like the non-stick frying pan, that mythical spin off from the US’s space programme, these innovations might well have happened without motor racing. But looking at racing’s technological advances can still teach us some wider lessons about innovation itself.

The AIM report looks at a number of innovations within racing itself and draws from then some thoughts that might be pertinent for others who are pushing forward technology.

For example, the report describes diesel engines developed for the 24-hour Le Mans race. A German racing car manufacturer created an engine block made out of aluminium, “something nobody had done before”.

This particular idea relied on working with long-established partners, but that may not be the best source of groundbreaking ideas. The report says that a weak spot in the industry’s innovation strategy may be its failure to tap into external input of the sort behind another “radical innovation” in motor racing technology, the use of carbon fibre in Formula-1 cars.

In general, the report advocates more “lateral thinking within the industry”. It also recommends “the development of inter-sector relationships, between the aerospace and motorsport industries, for example”.

The nice thing about the motor sport industry is that it is a less complicated research challenge than bigger and complicated sectors. This relative simplicity can make it easier identify and study the factors in play when it comes to successful innovation.

Professor Delbridge certainly has lessons for the motorsport sector, and advice to the policy makers on how to keep the show on the road. But there are also messages in the work for the wider innovation community.

The report says that “By studying the way that the motorsport industry approaches innovation it is possible for organisations in both the public and private sector to become more effective at supporting and developing radical innovation.”

The topic in the researchers’ headlights was “the way the motorsport industry harnesses the power of diverse networks -  networks outside the usual sphere that a firm operates within – to generate radical innovations”. That’s something that all innovators have to think about.

The report has a set of bullet points that describe the characteristics of successful innovators. They:

• Engage in wide exploratory innovation search activities, looking beyond their own knowledge base and domain of expertise;
• Identify the advantages offered by new combinations of existing knowledge, through the application of technologies and materials initially developed elsewhere;
• Often partner with ‘unusual’ firms – firms that operate beyond the usual sphere of collaboration, in the motorsport industry;
• Collaborate with partner companies to establish a close working relationship – strengthening personal ties and promoting more general reciprocity and trust;
• Encourage lateral thinking within their existing web of partners.

You don’t have to be a petrol head to find something of interest in there.