Innovation, With a Capital I

Innovation is the key to success at the X Games, it's true for tricks and for equipment. Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, says that followers of extreme sports have become expert at adapting and refining the equipment they use. This week we and Professor von Hippel finally get to see a few of the new tricks the athletes and the engineers have kept up their sleeves for the past year and they aren't leaving anyone hanging. Anyone who is interested in how to innovate, what innovation really is, or feels a need to prove to themselves that sometimes, innovation is more than a buzzword, should spend a few hours watching ESPN's coverage of the X Games in California this weekend.

The increasing popularity of Freestyle sports, including motocross drives athletes and engineers to new heights. Travis Pastrana, one of the premier athletes in “Extreme” sports has innovated past the wildest expectations of fans executing tricks like the double back flip previously possible only in video games. Now, the engineers have joined him in attempts to create a motorcycle that will allow the rider to spin the handlebars as they jump. Engineers had to completely rethink motorcycle fork and suspension design spending $250,000 on the “one-off” bike Travis used in the August 2006 Summer X Games.

The bike's front end cost over $250,000 to design and produce. And although it looked like it was heavily derived from bicycle technology, Pastrana's people assured me it was 100% moto-inspired. The mini-forks only allowed for a few inches of travel so the landing was tricky. The bike was also equipped with a Recluse auto-clutch to give engineers one less cable to worry about. The process was so secretive that Cernics-Suzuki spokespersons would not reveal the identities of the design team members or allow any pre-X games pictures of the bike.

This serves as a reminder that innovation is inherently risky, especially when testing involves jumping 65 feet on hard, packed dirt. Look at the new fork design above, it represents a year’s worth of work for a team of engineers and hundreds of thousands invested. This also reminds us that innovation is hard, in this case for the hardware and for the human. Those new barspin forks broke during taking off for a jump during X Games competition. Despite this setback, the new design promises to revolutionize motorcycle suspension design.