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Overheated innovation and the World Cup

That's the Jabulani, the brand new super-duper official ball of the 2010 World Cup. Plenty has been written about its characteristics and whether or not players and coaches like it. Engadget Alt recently posted on the news that NASA has found the ball "unpredictable at speeds above 44mph." Ironically, when I heard some of the designers interviewed, they touted "consistency" as their main goal, i.e. the ball should not skew the results away from the skill level of the player. Even if they may have fallen short of that goal, I think the goal itself implies a fairly robotic view of sports. We don't only care about "skill," i.e. the ability of a player to kick/hit/run furthest, fastest, and with the most precision. That's why we don't just watch that guy who can make thousands of consecutive free throws all day. The mechanics are no doubt important, but we care about sport because of the drama of adaptation, the players who can step their game up against an opponent everyone expects to crush them. In that sense, whether we got one or not, I don't think a "better" ball is necessarily what we want for the sport of soccer.*

But the World Cup is the merchandising and promotional opportunity heard 'round the world, and it only comes but every four years, so there must be new things to sell. According to the WSJ article linked above, Adidas sold 15 million of its official ball for the 2006 World Cup. Personally I'd guess that they'd sell just about as many if they only changed the branding, not the structure of the ball, but I can understand the desire to add perceived value by changing the structure too. There's nothing particularly wrong with that motivation, but it shouldn't be confused with other motivations we value differently when thinking about public policy, e.g. innovation. We tend to think of innovation as a universal good; we always want more of it, and we want to encourage it whenever possible. We want this because innovation is a primary component of our notion of progress, and we all want to leave the world a better place than we found it. I don't think we're nearly as universally optimistic about capitalizing on promotional opportunities; sure, that may drive some economic growth, but by and large policymakers should probably be neutral on whether or not there is a new official branded thingamajig for the latest big international hullabaloo.

The Jabulani highlights the problems that arise when we equate change with innovation. You have to imagine that patents were applied for on its design and structure, and there's no reason to suspect they won't be granted. In theory, those patents are supposed to represent a bargain between Adidas and the rest of us: Adidas produces some innovation, and in return we give them exclusive rights. The problem is that we don't do a good enough job distinguishing change from innovation. Obviously it's a hard line to draw, and the patent system can still be a good thing on balance even if some non-innovations get patented, but if we keep the bar very low, then we're providing a hopped-up incentive to just change things. Pam Samuelson et al. have termed this "overheated innovation", to be distinguished from product-enhancing innovation. While I might prefer we just raise the bar on what we're willing to call innovation, Samuelson's term does have the nice feature of avoiding that fight and focusing on the motivations of the innovators involved, which cuts to the important point: we should focus our regulatory incentives (like IP protection) on getting people to create better products, not just different ones. The controversy around the Jabulani provides a good opportunity to talk about honing that focus. No doubt we'll still get a shiny new ball in 2014, but maybe we won't bother to subsidize it with patent protection.

*- we might actually want a "trickier", less predictable ball, if play had gotten too easy and routine with the existing ball, but that's just not a credible explanation for the Jabulani.