Innovation...on your bike!

The popularity of cycling has rocketed recently. Whether you're a fixed-gear devotee, or a hard-core mountain biker, cycling is something almost everyone can do.

But it's also been a sporting success story linked to some quite amazing innovation.

There's more to cycling than a nice Saturday spent following the Regents Canal. In recent years cycling, specifically competitive track cycling, has seen a huge amount of high-tech product development and it's having a big impact on high street and online retailers.

This innovation story started with a step-change that caught our imagination in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when Chris Boardman broke the 4000m pursuit world record, lapping his competitor (the then world champion) in the process.

Boardman is now leading the 'Secret Squirrel Club' - GB cycling's high-tech think-tank that is challenging the technical development of the sport. Dave Brailsford, the British Cycling coach is also using a technological approach in his role with the Team Sky professional cycling team.

All of which is interesting but someone more cynical and less of a bike geek than me might say this is all actually just a cover story for the massive investments being made by bike manufacturers to tap into a massive rise in cycling popularity. Actually there might be some truth in that so let's take a look at what the commercial angle is.

You no longer need an in with Lotus to ride a carbon fiber race bike, you can get one from retailers on your High Street or from a staggering array of online specialists - the technology that helped Boardman win Olympic Gold is now available to all of us.

Whilst some of this stuff is expensive, the sheer growth of new bike products on the market shows that new consumer markets can be created when backed-up by big bold investment, and that manufacturers can use applied technology to develop exciting new products to exploit that market. The trend for innovation is driving a very lucrative market and it's people like me, and many of you that are keeping it going.

So I decided to look around at what's new to accelerate this innovation?

The example I've chosen here is as big and bold as any seen in the cycling industry for a long time, maybe since the Boardman bike in '92. The Factor001, like other innovations before it, comes via the aerospace and F1 world. It's a concept bike that I'm sure they don't expect to sell in any volume but is a very effective initiative to showcase new groundbreaking product features that I expect we will see come to market in the pro-cyclist world and then in the bike shops.

I've chosen to use cycling as a means to talk about innovation and the examples are certainly eye catching but what does this all mean?

Well, in my view it's an easy case study for redefining a market through the clever and calculated use of emerging technologies and the creation of high profile concepts that can lead to real change in products (or services for that matter).

So there may be a lesson transferable into your organization - are you playing around with emerging technologies because it feels like the right thing to do, or do you have a strategic view of how it might create a new market for you?

Image courtesy of GizMag