Actually, It Is Rocket Science

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Outside Online April 2002

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The Big Idea: CASE STUDY #3: Inside a High-Tech Skunk Works
Actually, It Is Rocket Science

THE DAY I WITNESS the 'biner massacre, I'm also shown projects CSI is working on for Lange (calibrating settings for the Rear Release System on its V9 downhill ski boot) and Mavic (testing the aerodynamics of its Cosmic bike wheel), as well as a bevy of in-house prototypes. There's a climber's exercise apparatus (a wooden pyramid with edges and notches on all sides to improve balance and toe placement), a "bladder bolt" (an inflatable rubber tube to be used as protection in rock climbing), a "poop chute" (a small parachute that lets climbers dispose of their excrement while up on big walls, so as to avoid shit-bombing the climbers below), and an automatic belay device called Johnny Belay, later renamed the iClimb (a winch activated by remote control so a person can climb in a gym without a human belaying partner).

Most of these are student experiments, and as such don't contribute any money to CSI's

R&D expert Dan Levine believes CSI's ideas can pay off, but only if they're tested in the field: "I trust MIT's white lab coats, but who's trying on the breathable wet coats?"

kitty unless or until Blair and his charges are able to sell the idea on the open market. But I also get to inspect one of the very first New Balance M920s, special triathlon shoes with a heel-strap instead of a solid back (making it easier to slip a soggy foot into). The shoe, based in part on the work of a class of '01 CSI student named Chi-An Wang, was sponsored by New Balance to the tune of $5,000 and is due in stores this June.

Still, for CSI, innovation is not just about inventions. "Just as often as we're trying to make something new, we're trying to examine conventional wisdom," Blair points out. "Sometimes reinforcing it, other times debunking it. A lot of what we do is getting the noise out of the data."

To wit: In 2000, when Trek came out with its latest carbon-fiber bike frame (built for the U.S. Postal Service Cycling Team that raced in the Tour de France), Blair used the wind tunnel to test the frame and to give feedback on its rider—Lance Armstrong's former teammate, Tyler Hamilton. "We put him in the wind tunnel and we dialed his position with respect to the frame," Blair says proudly. Translation? CSI helped Hamilton configure the bike for minimal wind resistance. That kind of data, and the manner in which it was obtained, indicates how elite athletes think about winning these days. It's a war of incrementalism out there, and technology is the key.

"The top people in a sport are only hundredths of a second apart," notes Gerhard Pawelka, 37, currently director of new ventures at the Boston offices of IDEO, an international design concern. He's tested products at CSI, and thinks it's important that MIT has tools "that can measure, and accurately measure, down to the tenths and hundredths of a percentage point. The ground for refining products has gotten thin. That makes even minute improvements count for more."

There's one other thing, however, that gear makers demand: testers who can take their products out of the lab and into the mud. "From a lab perspective, I'd have no misgivings about using MIT," says Dan Levine, director of design and development for REI's 40-person Gear & Apparel Group. "But from a field perspective, they have to have the users. I trust their white lab coats, but who's trying on the breathable wet coats?"

Blair says he's got this covered. He recruits his testers from a student body that's desperate to take a break from quantum physics and go outside to play. "When I have a cycling project, I e-mail the cycling-club list," he says. "We've got 5,000 undergrads and as many graduate students, and almost all of them have a sport. I'd have to say that's really the single most important thing we offer: students who are 'lead users.'"

His use of that term is no mistake. It comes from The Sources of Innovation, a recently reissued handbook by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Eric von Hippel. It took a tweedy business prof to convince some corporate tyros what any unhappy camper knows only too well: The person who has spent a miserable night in a leaky sleeping bag understands better than anybody what it'll take to make it work.

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