Exploring America’s Innovation
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Following the Innovators’ Road Trip, we were all in Austin for the SXSWi conference. While the weekend was busy for everyone, I managed to sneak in some time to grab a quick interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Because time was limited, I limited myself to the one question that was on everyone’s mind while in their warehouse in Louisville.
Hear what Tony has to say about the robots being used in the Zappos fulfillment process.
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Maker’s Mark has an unwavering commitment to keeping their distilling process unchanged. Unchanged to the point that they do as much as they can by hand. But operational growth is driving innovation in ways that are quite remarkable.
They still use 6 original cyprus vats (12 feet deep and 12 feet across) to do their brewing – those and an additional 40 stainless steel vats. They slow grind their grains rather than smashing them. They have their own supply of yeast, that’s been in the family since before prohibition. They distill their mash down to 120 proof alcohol. Barrel it in new oak barrels charred inside for 45 seconds. Hand roll their barrels into their warehouses. Rotate them from the top racks to the bottom racks after 3 years. Then taste them after 6 years to make sure they’re done. If the taster’s agree that the batch is acceptable then they bottle it and hand-dip it in their trademark red wax.
That’s a formula they don’t want to mess with. It’s been successful for them and they believe they can grow their market because of it. However, as they have grown over the past few years they have found other challenges arise that have forced innovation. One of the main obstacles was what to do with their by-product wastes. As a small operation, they gave most of the leftover grain by-products to local farmers. But soon they had more than local farmers needed and it didn’t last long enough to ship.
Cue necessity and innovation. Rather than take the traditional route of building a centrifuge that could get the water out of the grain, in an expensive and inefficient manner, Maker’s Mark instead took a chance. They built a slow-screw process that squeezes out enough of the water that the grain can be shipped to regional farmers (instead of just local ones). Then the waste water is anaerobically processed (which is innovative but also produces a horrid stench) to create methane gas that is pumped back to the distillery to heat the mash vats.
In fact, before we arrived the natural gas company had called Maker’s Mark to question why their usage had dropped so much. Their process has been live for about 8 months but they are already seeing how it will help them expand their operations.
What intrigued us about this stop on our #iroadtrip was how they’ve been able to find new ways to make the operation scale without losing their distinctive hand-made process.
Considering that so much of social media wrestles with this same question, what other lessons can we take from Maker’s Mark?
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We made it to Louisville on Wednesday and Thursday morning had the chance to head into town for a tour of the Louisville Slugger Museum.
I was guiding Jim and looked down at the GPS as we got close. “I think it’s just up ahead,” I said.
“It’s right there,” Jim said, pointing to a 3 story tall bat leaning on a red brick building.
The first thing that we were shown was a new line of products that Louisville Slugger is branching into – Gloves. And not just batting gloves either.
In fact, proving that innovation can come from anywhere, the genesis of this product line happened when Louisville Slugger started hearing from customers that they were purchasing the batting gloves for use in the garden. As you may expect, this was not a demographic that Louisville thought was in their market.
That spurred them to start working with Dr. Klein, a hand surgeon, to research how gloves for sports, work, and other activities could be made better. They poured significant resources into research and development and it’s paying off for them. Some of their key findings were how the fingers curled but most gloves didn’t follow naturally and how the arc of the bone means most gripping is done with the knuckles.
The brand that came out of this is Bionic Gloves, they are designed to fill in the valleys of those arcs that put stress on your joints when holding a golf club or tennis racket for example. The gloves pad specific spots giving you more usable surface area on the hand. Rick Redman and Vickie Boisseau described for us how much innovation they were putting into the gloves. They weren’t just taking one idea and putting it into mass production but really looking at the different needs they could fulfill. They currently have versions for baseball, golf, driving, motorcycles, work gloves, gardening, and roses. Yes, they found that people had a desire for specific handwear while trimming their flowers – notably, something that protected their forearms.
What struck us most from the innovation stand-point was how much research they had to put into their idea before the innovation could start affecting their customers. It’s a bit of a different ethos than we see online where it’s so easy to start trying things that seeing what sticks is the research.
For a company that’s been solid in one business for so long, it’s interesting to see them branching out in a way that fills a completely separate market need but keeps them close to their core audience of sports enthusiasts.
How can other companies push themselves to innovate in new directions that allow them to build on their core communities?
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Cincinnati social media community is an example of community management innovation. Social media is a pretty open term, it’s a free-flowing community of people that can self-select to join, participate in, or leave. How to you help shape a positive community experience around that? Kevin Dugan and Daniel Lally decided to step into that role as they saw the Cincinnati social media community growing and multiple groups beginning to organize events.
The Social Media Club was hosting educational presentations, Bryan Person of LiveWorld came down to start the Social Media Breakfast, and various Tweet-ups were cropping up as well. Having participated myself in all of these groups, they offer excellent content and opportunities. However, this deluge was starting to fatigue what was still a relatively close-knit group. What they decided to do was spearhead an integrated approach – continuing to host meetings at different times of day but with more centralized planning that would allow more people to decide what worked for them, rather than feeling a need to attend each different groups’ events.
From the outsider perspective, I noticed that people were very familiar with one another and very comfortable with the atmosphere. It was an easy going group, talking and mingling with one another. Even the people in for the Proctor and Gamble social marketing launch (still sorry we missed that) were having no trouble mixing in. We met some great people during that tweet-up including an interview with Robin Sloan of Current TV.
What are you doing to understand the unique needs of your audience or community in order to help you innovate?
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We had a chance to sit down with Shawn Morton, the Director of Social Media at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus about how they are moving forward as a large organization using social media.
Some of our key takeaways from this interview are:
Listen to the interview and add your thoughts in the comments.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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