I’ve wanted to post about football and innovation for a while, and now seems to be a good time for a couple of reasons. First, previous IdeaFlow author and good friend Renee Hopkins inspired me with her excellent post, Football Scores with Constraint-Driven Innovation. Plus, the Texas Tech (my alma mater) vs. University of Texas game is rapidly approaching, so football is top of mind for me this week.
In her post, Renee talked about two constraints that drive high schools and colleges to be more innovative than the pros:
1) Unavailability of talent–high schools have the least amount of choice when it comes to their rosters; therefore, their coaches must find creative ways to make a team that has relatively few talented players competitive.
2) The set of rules and its associated loopholes that governs the game. These rules have given rise to California’s Piedmont High School’s innovative A-11 offensive set in which all 11 players are potentially eligible to catch the ball on every down.
It struck me that these restrictions are not unlike those we face as innovators. In many cases, we don’t have the luxury of looking elsewhere for money or talent; yet innovation can spring from thinking creatively about how to best use our limited resources. Likewise, if we examine them closely, the rules under which our businesses operate can actually work to our advantage, inspiring us to look at situations and solutions in new ways.
Business and football share a couple of other constraints. For example, both have long, ingrained histories regarding strategies and game plans that are acceptable and successful and those that are not. Yet those time-proven conventions can serve as springboards to innovation, as Texas Tech (arguably one of the most innovative teams in recent college football history) has shown. For those who are not familiar with Tech’s approach, here’s an excerpt from the feature article in this month’s Texas Monthly, “Mike Leach Is Thinking...”
“Instead of a dense, seemingly impenetrable offensive line, Tech’s linemen are spaced three to four feet apart, twice the norm, leaving enormous gaps that seem to invite tackles and linebackers to stroll right through them. The quarterback operates from the shotgun, and on most plays four or five receivers are spread across the breadth of the field. This creates huge amounts of space between players, making the whole thing look porous and vulnerable, even skeletal, until it swings into action. Which it does between 85 and 90 times a game. A typical offense snaps the ball 65 to 70 times a game, but Tech never huddles. It is all attack, all the time. …Receivers stretch the field from chalk to chalk, taking the defensive backs with them. The defensive linemen—who are forced to spread out too, lest they lose their rushing angles—must therefore attack from longer range, creating even more room. Suddenly the grid opens up, and the quarterback is looking at what [Coach Mike] Leach calls ‘pieces of space.’ Lots of them.”
In this case, Leach studied what historically has been deemed an ineffective approach (an offensive line full of holes) and made it the cornerstone of his team’s success. And businesses have the opportunity to do the same thing. The highly successful Olay Regenerist line is the direct result of Procter & Gamble’s willingness to turn its internal R&D legacy on its head and commit to accessing 50% of its new ideas, technologies, and products from outside the company.
Another shared constraint is that of simplicity. Generally speaking, the more complex an innovation–whether in football or business–the more difficult its road to success. And yet time after time we see companies assuming that bells-and-whistles products hold the key to their next breakthrough. Likewise, many sports authorities have presumed complexity and intricacy underlies Tech’s offense; yet in actuality it consists of fewer than two dozen plays. In much the same way, disruptive innovation (as defined by Clayton Christensen) often involves simplification rather than the introduction of complexity. Just look at the Flip, which has changed the consumer video camera landscape; or blogging’s shake up of traditional content management.
So as you cheer on your favorite teams this weekend, regardless of whether they win, lose or tie, remember you could be watching a metaphor for the next amazing innovation.
Wreck ‘em, Tech! (Couldn't resist!)
- Gwen Smith Ishmael
www.twitter.com/Gwen_Ishmael