I started working here when Adidas could still be considered an innovative company. What happened in the meantime? Why is there no more innovation? Unfortunately, I think the reason is that the most talented left because they were the least valued. The remaining ones gave up.
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The guy that Innovation reported to is a McKinsey fraud without a clue. Just someone way out of their depth who can talk the talk but has not basic understanding of sport, engineering, design, technology, and innovation.
The new head of innovation from Lululemon is famous for TedTalks and delivering nothing during his tenure at Lulu. The dept at Lulu was called The White Space and the joke was that it was because only white people worked there. After many years the talk and nice presentations wore off and questions came in regarding why nothing had been achieved or delivered to market after many years and lots of R&D spend. Now he is head of Adidas. Nice guy but out of depth.
The head of footwear product innovation is also a nice guy who will not cause his superiors any grief but is also far beyond his capability as a leader.
All the people who delivered innovation have left. What is left is people who can write a nice PPT, follow up stuff on an excel tracking report, and make a nice tedtalk speech to show everyone they are not daft.
I think the bigger problem, is that bringing innovations to life is so broken…. There is a pipeline, but no horizontal strategy to properly identify, invest, and launch innovations in a way that can scale. Boost is the last one that worked, nearly 10 years ago.
A new technology has one of two fates:
- We double down on something that has no reasonable roadmap for scaling, or being cost effective…. The team just isn’t asked to think operationally at all. It’s fine to have certain pet projects, but we over index on resources for things that have little chance of being commercial.
- Innovations get pitched to the BUs, but the BU refuses to invest. They still operate very independently, so they cannot see the bigger picture, especially if that would require short term margin loss in order to scale. If there’s no horizontal strategy that forces adoption with a really clear roadmap, BUs will simply point to their margin targets - and reject.
We desperately need a stronger, horizontal, top-down approach to product and innovation vision….This must trickle down to the BUs, so we avoid fragmentation because they are operating in a vacuum.