This is the time of the year when grown men, for they are mostly men, arouse themselves at strange hours on Sunday mornings to collapse in front of a TV and to watch odd looking vehicles going around in circles very fast. Supporters of this pastime like to defend their gas-guzzling sport on the grounds that it is a test-bed for technologies that will one day end up in cars that roll off of the production lines.
While the notion of a ‘trickle down’ of technology from racing to the high street has never been that convincing, it seems that there are other lessons that we can draw from the industry behind motor racing. A new report from the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), 'Racing For Radical Innovation – How motorsport companies harness network diversity for discontinuous innovation', looks into “how the successful introduction of innovation in motorsport is organised and managed”.
The report, by Rick Delbridge of the Cardiff Business School and Francesca Mariotti of the University of Stirling, points out 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”.
When looking for spin-offs from motor racing, it may be a mistake to look to the production lines. The report refers instead to “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” as innovations that have their origins in the motorsport industry.
Of course, like the non-stick frying pan, that mythical spin-off from the US’s space programme, you have to ask whether these innovations would have happened anyway. It would be silly, though, to deny that motor racing has been ingenious at innovation for its own purposes.
The report describes the case of the diesel engine and the 24-hour Le Mans race. A German racing car manufacturer managed to develop an engine block made out of aluminium, “something nobody had done before”. This one relied on working with long-established partners, but that may not be the best source of groundbreaking ideas. Indeed, a weak spot in the industry’s innovation strategy is its failure to tap into external input of the sort that fuelled another “radical innovation” in motor racing technology, the use of carbon fibre in a Formula-1 car.
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”.
These ideas, and the suggestion that it can help to “partner with ‘unusual’ firms,” show why this research has implications beyond motor racing. As a discrete industry it is easier to identify and study the factors in play when it comes to successful innovation.
As the report puts it, “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.” This is probably the last thing in the minds of those early risers intent on catching the hornet like buzzing of racing cars in distant places, but it does make the focus of their interest seem slightly less pointless.
http://www.aimresearch.org/uploads/File/pdf/Executive%20Briefing/AIM%20Motorsport%20v2(1).pdf
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