SPECIAL REPORT: Welsh academic warns of threat to F1 knowledge

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.