With an annual turnover of £6.0 billion, and supporting 38,500
full and part-time jobs, motorsport and performance engineering is one of the
UK's industrial success stories.
Beyond its immediate
contribution to the UK economy the motorsport industry is also a best practice
example of how creativity, engineering, manufacturing and support services can
be combined to produce world class radical innovations that have an impact well
beyond the confines of motor racing.
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.
To successfully develop and
deploy radical innovations in the motorsport industry firms have to be able to
manage diversity in terms of both knowledge and contacts.
This capability allows
networks to become more open and enables firms to reach a wide range of
perspectives, skills and resources.
The research reported here
highlights the importance of search and network management capabilities in
radical innovation. These activities are likely to benefit firms operating in a
wide range of industry sectors, but especially those where expertise is widely
dispersed and competition is intense, dynamic and founded in knowledge-intensive
products and processes.
Our research has confirmed
the highly innovative nature of motorsport, and identified a number of examples
of how extensive search for innovation opportunities and collaboration with
distant partners has led to successful discontinuous innovation.
However, our research has
also found that these capabilities are not as widely distributed through the
sector as might be expected. It has also highlighted a number of obstacles to
current and future innovation activity.
In particular, recent changes
in the regulation of the sport to contain costs and maintain competition may
have the unintended consequence of restricting innovation.
In addressing its weaknesses
and the challenges it faces with respect to promoting innovation activity, we
suggest a number of specific priorities for the UK motorsport
industry:
■ Promote lateral thinking within the industry;
■ Build capability in the identification of technological
opportunities and the
development of boundary
spanning activities;
■ Build capability in the development of inter-sector
relationships, between
the aerospace and motorsport
industries, for example;
■ Develop network management capability, both in terms of
innovation search
and collaboration building;
■ Work to ensure that regulatory changes do not undermine
innovative activity.
Equally there are several
things that we suggest policymakers should focus on
in order to support the
industry:
■ Widen the focus of policy intervention to related sectors in
order to promote
connectedness and sustain
radical innovation in motorsport and the spillover
of innovations across
sectors;
■ Support firms in network development activities, both along the
supply chain and
horizontally, through the
provision of information on successful innovation and
network building practices;
■ Assist firms in the identification and mapping of suppliers and
institutional expertise;
■ Assist firms in the identification of potential technological
opportunities both
within the motorsport
industry and in other sectors;
■ Promote the development of skills through the provision of a
dedicated
infrastructure.
The obstacles to innovative
activity in motorsport, as revealed by our research findings, threaten to
significantly limit future innovations by race teams and may also undermine the
future impact of innovation undertaken in motorsport across the wider economy
and society.
Professor Rick Delbridge is a senior fellow at Cardiff Business
School
*Racing
For Radical Innovation - How motorsport companies harness network diversity for discontinuous innovation is produced by
the Advanced Institute of Management Research.
.gif){kind=small}