Infusing Innovation at Spalding

There is a great article in the March 31 issue of Technology Review on Spalding and the Infusion basketball that you must read.  Thanks to Advancing Insights for bringing the article to my attention.  Here was a highly mature category, driven to commodity status by lack of innovation and a retailer-driven focus on competitive pricing and cost reduction.

Enter Dan Touhey, a young product manager determined to add some excitement into the category.  Through research his team conducted, consumers saw little wrong with their current basketballs, yet when the discussions were steered to inflation, everyone had a story to tell.  Touhey and his team had identified a compelling unmet need.

The next chapter includes the classic 'aha' moment of every great innovation story:  Watching his father carve the Thanksgiving turkey, he was inspired with the idea of putting a pop-up pump directly into basketball for easy inflation adjustment without an external pump.   Many technical challenges and three years later, Spalding introduced the Infusion Basketball to the market, and grew their market share from 32% before the introduction to an astounding 64% one year later.

I love this story, because it touches on some very important lessons for companies and individuals involved in innovation.

1) There are few (if any) commodity categories that can't be re-invented through true innovation.  It's all about defining the problem correctly and in searching for solutions to a more broadly defined goal.

2) Identifying compelling unmet (and often unspoken) consumer needs is critical.  In this case, Dan and his team identified a non-obvious yet important need (inflation frustrations) by looking beyond the basketball itself and at the entire usage experience. 

3) Breakthrough innovation comes at the intersections of compelling unmet consumer needs, marketplace opportunities and enabling technologies/solutions.  It's not a linear process, and one can't expect the inspiration or solution to emerge immediately after conducting focus groups (or in time for the next planogram reset at Wal-Mart).  Armed with the creative fuel of unmet consumer needs, solutions emerge at unexpected times and in unexpected ways (like on an empty stomach at Thanksgiving).

4) The business world is littered with tales of great ideas that never see the light of day not because of the quality of the idea...but because of fear of failure, a culture of risk aversion, or other forms of corporate constipation.  It takes inspired innovators like Dan Touhey and champions like his EVP, Eddie Binder (who supported this risky initiative) to succeed.

But the lesson: it can be done.  Thank you Dan and Eddie for reminding us.

Comments

[jim wilde]

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[Brian]

I enjoyed this post quite a bit. Thank you.