Learning to Innovate
with Bobby Unser
Filmed January 2009

Video Comments

Interactive Transcript

I learned innovation work from my dad. I mean, Daddy looked at life differently. He looked at items differently.

He didn't have any money. So therefore, when you don't have money, you have to innovate. If you don't have money, you have to innovate because you can't ask somebody else what the answers are.

Or you don't hire somebody to do the job that you could or should be doing. So that's where innovation comes from. I do it in everything.

I mean, I've changed snowmobiling so much, during the early '70s, that people just can't believe it.

Snow Goer Magazine ran a study one time about, "Where did all this stuff in snowmobiles come from?"

It all came from Bobby Unser. That's what they discovered. That's the big innovation, like the shock absorbers.

Snowmobiles at one time had no shock absorbers on them and the suspensions would travel like maybe two, two and a half inches.
I went from that to six inches, eight inches, in shock absorbers.

In the beginning, Monroe was our big shock manufacturer in those days, with racing. They laughed at me when I said I wanted some shocks made for my snowmobiles.

So no problem. I just had a friend in Milwaukee make them out of friction shocks. You know? Shocks that work with friction, with pads, and sold those things sold by the tons.

I remember I got 15 cents for every one that was sold.

And that's innovations. You see a necessity; you figure out how to get there. That's where innovations happen and come from.

It isn't that you're any smarter. It's that your mind is working. That's where it all comes from.

You think, "I need to get there. How am I going to get there?" Main thing is you're not gonna hire somebody to do it. You do it yourself.


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filling a need, lack of money requires innovation, shock absorbers for snowmobiles, snowmobile development, father's influence

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