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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS104

Do you know what the similarity between an aircraft wing and a ski is?
Or between a ski and a tennis racket? Howard Head did. His use of the
idea-generating technique of analogies allowed him to revolutionise two
industries with his Head skis and Prince tennis rackets respectively.
Head’s revolutionary products opened up these markets to individuals
who thought that they could not participate. Structured idea-generating
techniques can enable you in exactly the same way.

Howard Head – an analogical approach to
business success80

Howard Head epitomises the entrepreneurial skill of

seeing analogies between elements which are similar but different. This
facility to perceive patterns between related ideas applied to his whole
life path, since he realised that his great transferable skill lay in
debugging and perfecting things. He had the ability to spot similarities
between apparently quite different user markets and a gift for spotting
how to transfer technologies between apparently quite different
applications.

During World War Two, Head worked as an aircraft engineer and
developed expertise in the various uses of aluminium. After the war, Head
took up skiing. He was massively incompetent. Whereas most amateurs
would have wished to avoid the charge of being the bad workman who
blames his tool, Head was quite happy to reverse this assumption. He was
convinced that the problem lay in the skis, not in his ability. ‘I was
humiliated and disgusted at how badly I skied, and characteristically, I was
inclined to blame it on the equipment, those long, clumsy hickory skis.’81
That is not to say that this blame was completely unjustified, however. In
1947, skis were made of wood, which quickly lost its shape and thus left the
skier with little control. Head was also convinced that if he was
experiencing problems, then others would be as well.

Head’s first great insight was to perceive how the design, materials and
construction processes used in aircraft manufacture could be applied to
the design and manufacture of metal skis. His ski idea drew on the
analogy of the structural principle common in the aircraft industry:
metal-sandwich construction. This analogy from aircraft design and
construction allowed Head to imagine a ski made of two light layers of
aluminium bonded to sidewalls of thin plywood, with a centre filling of
honeycomb plastic.