Background of Adidas
With over 40,000 people and sales of over 13 billion Euros in 2011, Adidas has become the world’s second-largest sportswear manufacturer. (Colombi & D’Itria, 2023) Adidas, founded in 1949, swiftly rose to prominence as a premier producer of athletic footwear, outfitting many participants for the 1952 Summer Olympics and the 1954 FIFA World Cup (Colicev, 2022).
Components That Contribute to Effective Innovation for Adidas
Adidas rapidly increased its market share in its early years because it was a preferred vendor for many professional soccer clubs and Olympic athletes (Jain et al., 2021). External focus, shared vision, leadership, the desire to innovate, and an appropriate organizational structure have all contributed to the company’s success and have made effective innovation possible.
External Focus
Adidas’ innovation strategy, largely driven by external focus, is consistent with a dedication to the open-source philosophy. This aids the company’s efforts to collaborate with athletes and customers, academic institutions and pioneering businesses, and governmental and non-profit research institutions on a global scale to create value for everybody (Faccia et al., 2023). Additionally, it welcomes constructive criticism and draws motivation from the advice of savvy business allies.
BASF is a commercial partner of Adidas’, and the two companies have worked together to manage and improve BOOST. This cushioning technology aims to provide athletes with optimal energy return, responsiveness, and comfort (Sicoli et al., 2019). In collaboration with Silicon Valley tech firm Carbon, Adidas has brought their revolutionary Adidas 4D model to life by enabling the mass production of additively built components (Beltagui et al., 2023). Through initiatives such as mentoring and collaborating with circular startups, Adidas is helping to accelerate sustainable innovation in the garment industry as part of Fashion for Good, a worldwide cross-brand drive to make all fashion sustainable.
Adidas ran its Speedfactories in Ansbach, Germany, and Atlanta, Georgia, with the help of Oechsler, a specialist in the automated production of technical components and assemblies. In 2019, however, they decided to roll out the Speedfactory platform to Asian vendors (Roso et al., 2019). The partnership between the firm and Oechsler will extend to more facets of production (Innovation, 2020).
Meanwhile, Adidas is working with Parley for the Oceans to develop products from recycled plastic debris rescued from beaches and other coastal communities before it can enter the ocean. Station F and Adidas unveiled their worldwide sports accelerator program, Platform A, in January 2019. Station F, in Paris, France, is the largest startup campus in the world (Innovation, 2020).
The accelerator’s mission is to harness the creativity of the global startup community to develop groundbreaking new applications for digital technology in sports (Mikheev et al., 2021). The first group of startups to participate in the program started their work in January, and in September 2019, they showcased their digital pilots (Innovation, 2019). Meanwhile, Adidas hired a new generation to explore prospects in women’s empowerment, sustainability, retail, and e-commerce.
Shared Vision, Leadership, and the Will to Innovate
According to its mission statement, Adidas’s main goal is “to be the design leader with a focus on bringing the best out of the athletes with performance-assured products in the worldwide sports market.” The Adidas Group has set a long-term goal of maximizing an athlete’s potential through its products; hence, it places a premium on product performance excellence (O’Connell et al., 2021).
Conversely, Adidas places equal importance on designing fashionable products. To maintain its concept pipeline full and current, the company is making significant investments in sustainable enablers and researching the potential of digitization throughout its whole value chain.
The quality of existing and future talent and leadership is vital to Adidas’ success. Typically, it fosters and inspires leadership through role models (Role Model Leadership, 2020). It is possible to recognize talents at all levels of the business that have the potential to become future leaders or important members of the team by using tools for talent management that have been specially created (Gillpatrick et al., 2022). They have specialized individual development plans and take part in focused development programs to prepare them for future responsibilities that will be more complex (Role Model Leadership, 2020).
As a result, the business is in a position to capitalize on the contemporary innovation landscape (Mohamed Shoffian et al., 2021). This environment goes beyond products and increasingly encourages innovation teams to consider developing experiences and services, offering greater degrees of openness, and directly integrating consumers through co-creation.
The organization has established five strategic pillars that help it create the greatest products due to its willingness to innovate. The pillars also provide the best consumer and athlete experiences while propelling game-changing innovations in the manufacturing, digital, and sustainability industries (Mitrano & Wohlleben, 2020). The five pillars are innovations for female athletes, manufacturing, digital and experience, sustainability, and athletes. These developments in the five pillars guarantee that all of the company’s present and future clients are considered.
Appropriate Organizational Structure
Adidas uses a matrix design structure for its corporate organization. It organizes its workforce and resources by their respective roles and the goods they produce (Muniz-Pardos et al., 2022). Employees in the projects, engineering, and manufacturing departments may report to two different managers simultaneously, as their responsibilities may overlap from one project to the next (Lee, 2021). After finishing a project, the staff will be assigned to new teammates. The company’s six primary divisions are Adidas’ marketing, human resources, finance, production, engineering, and projects (Kostyuchenko et al., 2021). Among the many Adidas divisions, the Marketing Division is crucial to the company’s success and overall objective.
One facet of being an innovation leader is a company’s ability to commercialize its inventions by developing cutting-edge technology and customer experiences. This is made possible by the matrix design of the company’s organizational structure (Bhaskaran, 2023). The unique ideas are only as valuable as their ability to be commercialized. For instance, the company makes products using Parley Ocean Plastic, which serves both the athletes and the world’s interests by preventing marine plastic pollution and delivering on the products’ performance promises (Domin et al., 2022).
Additionally, the company has implemented sustainability into its products and is expanding this initiative company-wide. More than eleven million pairs of its Sport Performance and Sport Inspired footwear franchises were produced in 2019 with Parley Ocean Plastic (Ahmad et al., 2020). About three million items from the 2019 clothing line featured Parley Ocean Plastic; this included jerseys for prominent clubs, including Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Juventus Turin, and Manchester United (Sun et al., 2022). This indicates how an appropriate organizational structure has made Adidas have effective innovations.
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