(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio - Formula One racing teams may have a lesson to teach business leaders: Innovation can be overrated.
That's the conclusion from academic researchers who pored over data from 49 teams over the course of 30 years of Formula One racing. They found that the teams that innovated the most - especially those that made the most radical changes in their cars - weren't usually the most successful on the race course.
Moreover, radical innovations were the least successful at exactly the times when many business leaders would be most likely to try them: when there were major changes in their regulatory environment.
"We found that it wasn't always good to be the aggressive innovator," said Jaideep Anand, co-author of the study and professor of strategy at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.
"The conventional wisdom that companies need to embrace change is often wrong."
The study appears in the current issue of the journal Organization Science.
Formula One racing is actually a very good venue to study the value of innovation in business, Anand said. It is an innovation-intensive industry with teams of engineers, drivers and sponsors who all have to work together to succeed.
The independent governing body for Formula One (FIA) imposes changes to racing teams' environments by releasing a new set of rules each year, which is similar to changes in the regulatory and business environment that businesses face on a regular basis.
The FIA rules define basic guidelines for technology advances in the sport and let teams know how much innovation they are allowed to incorporate each year.
Anand said the rule changes are more major in some years than others, allowing teams more leeway in how much change they can make in their cars.
When the researchers analyzed how much the teams innovated each year, and how well they performed on the race tracks, some findings stood out, Anand said.
For one, small amounts of innovation were generally good, but at some point, teams actually performed more poorly when they changed too much.
This was particularly true when the FIA made major changes to the rules, allowing teams more freedom to innovate.
"Teams sometimes believed that the more the rules changed, the more they had to change along with them," Anand said.
"But we found that small, incremental improvements were often better than big changes."
That's because Formula One cars - like many businesses - are complex, interconnected systems. If you change one part of the system, you risk changing other parts of the system that you want to stay the same.
"There's a risk when you make some kinds of changes that you won't be able to make the whole system work together again," Anand said.
The best path, he said, is usually to make changes on the margins, where you can gain some efficiency without disturbing all the other parts of the system.
Anand and his colleagues did a case study of one particular year in Formula One racing - 2009 - that illustrates many of these larger points.
That year the FIA approved a radical change allowing teams to use a new component - an energy-efficient technology known as the kinetic energy recovery system, or KERS.
This device could store the kinetic energy from the waste heat created by the car's brakes. Once stored in a battery, the energy could be used for acceleration.
The upside was intriguing, but it came with costs, Anand said. For example, it added weight to the car and the driver had to learn how to use the technology correctly.
Several teams jumped at the opportunity to add KERS to their cars, believing the possibilities outweighed the potential costs. But at the end of the year, two teams that did not use KERS - but instead concentrated on other, more marginal improvements - were the ones who finished on top in the standings.
"The KERS example in Formula One shows the dangers of jumping too quickly at the chance to innovate," Anand said. "You don't always get an advantage by moving first."
The lessons from Formula One can apply to many businesses, according to Anand. Like some Formula One teams, many older, mature businesses are especially tempted by the siren call of nimbleness and agility. They believe that if they can innovate quickly, they can protect their market.
"But if you have a firm that has grown and prospered, you have traded innovation and constant change for efficiency and reliability. Those can be real advantages, too," he said.
Anand said that, in his experience, it is often the top managers of a firm who most believe that they need to change and innovate more.
"Maybe they have too much exposure to management gurus and read too many books," he said jokingly. "The mid- to lower-level managers are often the ones who see how change can create problems for the rest of the system. They are closer to the customers and supplier and shop floor."
Anand cautioned that the results don't mean innovation, even radical innovation, is not sometimes needed in business.
"But we're pushing back at the conventional wisdom that innovation is always good, and is always the right choice for business. Sometimes there is value in going slow."
INFORMATION:
Anand's co-authors on the study were Alessandro Marion of LUISS University in Rome, Italy; Paolo Aversa of City University London; and Luiz Mesquita of Arizona State University.
Contact: Jay Anand, 614-247-6851; Anand.18@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
A research team at York has adapted the astonishing capacity of animals such as newts to regenerate lost tissues and organs caused when they have a limb severed.
The research, which is funded by a £190,158 award from the medical research charity Arthritis Research UK, is published in Nature Scientific Reports.
The scientists, led by Dr Paul Genever in the Arthritis Research UK Tissue Engineering Centre in the University's Department of Biology, have developed a technique to rejuvenate cells from older people with osteoarthritis to repair worn or damaged cartilage ...
Physicists suggest a new way to look for dark matter: They beleive that dark matter particles annihilate into so-called dark radiation when they collide. If true, then we should be able to detect the signals from this radiation.
The majority of the mass in the Universe remains unknown. Despite knowing very little about this dark matter, its overall abundance is precisely measured. In other words: Physicists know it is out there, but they have not yet detected it.
It is definitely worth looking for, argues Ian Shoemaker, former postdoctoral researcher at Centre ...
Putnam Valley, NY. (Aug. 19, 2015) - A team of researchers in South Korea has successfully transplanted mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) derived from human amniotic membranes of the placenta (AMSCs) into laboratory mice modeled with oxygen-induced retinopathy (a murine model used to mimic eye disease). The treatment aimed at suppressing abnormal angiogenesis (blood vessel growth) which is recognized as the cause of many eye diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration. The researchers reported that the AMSCs successfully migrated to the retinas ...
National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists and colleagues report that an experimental vaccine given six weeks before exposure to Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) fully protects rhesus macaques from disease. The vaccine also generated potentially protective MERS-CoV antibodies in blood drawn from vaccinated camels. A study detailing the synthetic DNA vaccine appears in the Aug. 19 Science Translational Medicine. MERS-CoV, which causes pneumonia deep in the lungs, emerged in 2012 and has sickened more than 1,400 people and killed 500, mostly in ...
Summary: In 2011, the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society issued a guideline recommending that neonates undergoing cardiac surgery for repair of congenital heart disease be placed on continuous encephalographic (EEG) monitoring after surgery to detect seizures. These recommendations followed reports that seizures are common in this population, may not be detected clinically, and are associated with adverse neurocognitive outcomes. Yet, in a discussion at the 2014 Annual Meeting of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery, 80% to 90% of the audience was not following ...
KINGSTON - Queen's University researcher Martin Duncan has co-authored a study that solves the mystery of how gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn formed in the early solar system.
In a paper published this week in the journal Nature, Dr. Duncan, along with co-authors Harold Levison and Katherine Kretke (Southwest Research Institute), explain how the cores of gas giants formed through the accumulation of small, centimetre- to metre-sized, "pebbles.
"As far as we know, this is the first model to reproduce the structure of the outer solar system - two gas giants, two ...
There are fewer smokers in the current generation of adolescents. Current figures show about 25 per cent of teens smoke, down dramatically from 40 per cent in 1987.
But are those who pick up the habit doing so because they have a negative self-image? Does the typical teenaged smoker try to balance out this unhealthy habit with more exercise? And if so, then why would an adolescent smoke, yet still participate in recommended levels of physical activity?
A recent study, conducted in part at Concordia University and published in Preventive Medicine Reports, sought to answer ...
Female fish in the Bahamas have developed ways of showing males that "No means no."
In an example of a co-evolutionary arms race between male and female fish, North Carolina State University researchers show that female mosquitofish have developed differently sized and shaped genital openings in response to the presence of predators and - in a somewhat surprising finding - to block mating attempts by males from different populations.
"Genital openings are much smaller in females that live with the threat of predators and are larger and more oval shaped in females ...
RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Few can forget the photos and videos of apocalyptic destruction a tsunami caused in 2011 in Sendai, Japan. Could Ventura and Oxnard in California be vulnerable to the effects of a local earthquake-generated tsunami? Yes, albeit on a much smaller scale than the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, according to computer models used by a team of researchers, led by seismologists at the University of California, Riverside.
According to their numerical 3D models of an earthquake and resultant tsunami on the Pitas Point and Red Mountain faults - faults located ...
BEER-SHEVA, Israel...August 19, 2015 - Social media channel communication (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) is sometimes the only telecommunications medium that survives, and the first to recover as seen in disasters that struck the world in recent years, according to a review study of emergency situations by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers in the International Journal of Information Management.
"Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management, and it becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organizations responding to ...
