“To get to one good idea, there’s hundreds of bad ideas.”
So says Cobra’s Vice President of Research, Development and Innovation Doug Roberts – the man behind the release of all of the brand’s latest golf club equipment.
Have you ever wondered what goes into developing and designing a new club? Long before it reaches your bag, or the shop floor, there are years of research, design, testing and, crucially, failure behind it.
Roberts offered a fascinating insight, speaking to Nicola Slater on the Your Golf Podcast, into what actually goes into the mechanics of a new golf club range and what goes on behind the scenes before they make it into the hands of golfers.
“Our innovation team are already working on 2030 products,” he said. “They’re coming up with the latest, greatest technology, trying to innovate and they’re testing different options and seeing what works.
“Once we get a technology through that innovation team that we’re excited about, that’s performing and adds something to the golfer, then we transfer that into our industrial design team. They’re the ones that start putting a shape and a look to it.”
Roberts explained how Cobra’s engineering team delivers a mock-up of the club, before running analysis on the different speeds at which it will be struck to determine performance gains.
Cobra’s Doug Roberts: “Even bad ideas are helpful”
Asked if there are any ideas that don’t make it past the drawing board, Roberts replied: “Hundreds. To get to one good idea, there’s hundreds of bad ideas.
“When you brainstorm, even bad ideas are helpful because if you come up with a bad idea, that might spark somebody else to say, ‘Well, what if we did this?’. Even though that may have been a bad idea, if we then tweaked it a little bit it now becomes a good idea.
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“That’s one of our rules in brainstorming. No idea is bad because even if it is a bad idea, it might lead to a good idea.”
If there’s one club golfers are likely to change most often, it’s their driver.
Roberts said the process for developing new driver models involved a combination of consumer research and brainstorming.
“It definitely starts in our innovation team, where we are coming up with a target profile and looking at the consumer, asking what does the consumer need? What does the consumer want?”
The team then moves that initial idea into the engineering stage, where they create computer models before producing and testing prototypes.
“The first step is to figure out how to deliver real performance for the golfer,” Roberts said: “We don’t want to just bring some technology out that’s not going to deliver something. We want to make sure that the innovation delivers real performance.”
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