Standardised platforms, fear-driven decisions, and industry echo chambers have replaced real conviction.
As products converge, brands lose authorship, relevance, and pricing power.
True innovation is not about new specs, but about the courage to take responsibility for difference.
This article is part of the Brixen Bike Papers – a 41 Publishing initiative from our 2025 Think Tank in Brixen, created with the goal of building a better bike world.
A series of essays diving into the uncomfortable truths, hidden opportunities, and real changes our industry needs. Click here for the overview of all released stories.
The Brixen World Bike Papers – What Really Defines “Innovation” in Cycling – Product, Culture, or Storytelling?
1. The Word We Abuse
“Innovation” has become the most repeated and least examined word in the bicycle industry.
It appears everywhere: press releases, keynotes, launch decks, trade show slogans. It is invoked so frequently that it has lost all friction. Innovation is no longer a claim that demands proof. It’s a default assumption, a checkbox, a label applied before the work is done.
And yet, when you step back and observe the market without brand bias or emotional attachment, the contradiction is obvious. If innovation were truly happening at the scale we claim, products would not look, ride, and feel so fundamentally similar. Entire categories would not be visually interchangeable. Conversations would not collapse so quickly into price, discounts, and spec comparisons.
What we call innovation today is often cosmetic refinement. A marginal geometry tweak sold as a breakthrough. A few additional Newton-meters positioned as a revolution. We have reduced progress to surface-level change and trained ourselves to celebrate motion rather than direction.
The industry is not short on technical competence. It’s short on ambition that extends beyond the safe, the explainable, and the immediately sellable.
2. The Lego Box Era
The current product landscape didn’t emerge by accident. It’s the logical outcome of how bicycles are conceived, developed, approved and also sold inside modern organisations.
Most brands operate within the same modular system. Carbon molds sourced from the same factories. Different platforms built around the same suspension principles. Drivetrains, motors, batteries, brakes, tyres selected from a finite catalogue of suppliers. Development increasingly resembles configuration rather than creation.
This is the Lego Box Era.
Open the box. Choose the frame platform. Select components from approved partners. Assemble within known parameters. Apply branding. Prepare launch assets.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with modularity. It brings efficiency, reliability, and scalability. The problem begins when modularity replaces authorship. When brands stop designing systems and start curating parts. When identity is reduced to specification rather than actual differentiation.
In this environment, differentiation becomes fragile. It lives in details that are invisible to most riders and meaningless outside expert circles. Bikes feel interchangeable because, at a structural level, they are. And no amount of storytelling can fully disguise that reality.
3. The Racification Trap
Many categories in cycling didn’t become narrow because the market demanded it. They became narrow because the industry rewrote their story. What started as open, playful, and exploratory experiences was gradually reframed through a single, dominant lens: competition.
Mountain biking did not begin as a race discipline. It emerged from curiosity, from riding trails without rules, from experimentation, from the simple desire to go further and have fun. Gravel followed a similar path. It was not born to be ranked, standardised, or optimised. It was a reaction against rigidity, a space between road and mountain, between structure and freedom.
Over time, however, the industry “racified” everything.
Racing became the primary mechanism of validation. Performance turned into the universal language of legitimacy. If a category wanted to be taken seriously, it had to prove itself through results, watts, weight, and podiums. What could not be measured was slowly marginalised. What couldn’t be raced was treated as secondary.
This shift had consequences far beyond competition itself. Once racing becomes the reference point, product development follows. Bikes are designed around extremes rather than realities. Communication prioritises speed, aggression, and optimisation. Media coverage amplifies the fastest, lightest, most radical expressions, even when they represent a tiny fraction of actual riders.
Numbers replace stories. Results replace meaning. Sensationalism replaces real rider needs.
In that environment, innovation stops asking fundamental questions. It no longer asks why people ride, what they feel, or how cycling fits into their lives. It asks how much lighter, how much faster, how much more powerful. Progress is defined vertically, not horizontally.
The tragedy is not that racing exists. Racing has always had its place. The problem is that racing has been allowed to define everything else. Entire categories are compressed into a single narrative, stripping them of diversity, accessibility, and emotional depth.
The limits of this logic become especially visible in the e-bike segment.
Here, racing has virtually no cultural influence. Performance benchmarks, race results, and competitive validation do not meaningfully shape demand. Actually it’s close to 0. It’s even crazier: the e-bike segment is probably the only segment that was inspired by the young, the cool or core riders. It started and grew because average Joes and Joannas understood its benefits. The fun, the exercise… they understood that their life quality would greatly benefit from buying an ebike.
And yet, the industry continues to apply the same narrative reflex.
More power. More torque. Faster acceleration. Lighter numbers. We play games and pretend that we – as a bike industry – are not able to change the rules. But we are the ones who can change them! We just neglect our power and impact – and our responsibility.
The result is confusion rather than clarity. E-bikes are used in radically different ways, by radically different people, in radically different contexts. When a single performance-driven story is imposed on such diversity, it fails to resonate.
This doesn’t weaken the argument. It exposes it.
This doesn’t invalidate the argument. It strengthens it.
When racing can no longer provide meaning, the absence of alternative narratives becomes painfully obvious. The problem is not that racing does not apply everywhere. The problem is that the industry has not learned how to speak when racing does not apply at all.
This isn’t evolution.
It’s reduction.
4. Why Innovation Became Risky
To understand why this condition persists, we need to look beyond products and into organisational behaviour.
In most companies today, real innovation carries asymmetrical risk. If it fails, the consequences are personal. Missed targets, internal exposure, loss of trust, stalled careers. If it succeeds, the reward is often abstract and collective. The system absorbs the credit.
But this imbalance is not only psychological. It’s structural.
Most bicycle brands operate with relatively small development teams when compared to their key suppliers. Companies like SRAM, Shimano, Bosch, or major suspension manufacturers can absorb years of iteration, testing, and failure. For them, imperfection is part of the process.
For brands, it’s not.
Developing something truly new means accepting that it may not work perfectly at launch. That it will require fixes, explanations, and patience from the market. For organisations with limited engineering depth and tight launch calendars, that risk feels disproportionate.
So the logic becomes obvious. It’s safer to rely on suppliers presumed to have “done their work properly.” It’s safer to integrate than to invent. It’s safer to assemble than to author.
This doesn’t eliminate risk. It displaces it.
And in doing so, brands slowly outsource not just development, but responsibility, differentiation, and ultimately, identity.
Under these conditions, people do not optimize for relevance or originality. They optimise for survival.
Decision-making becomes defensive. Incremental change is favoured because it is explainable. Familiar formats are repeated because they are easier to justify to boards, finance departments, and sales teams. Innovation becomes something that must be proven before it is attempted, benchmarked against competitors who are themselves not innovating.
This creates a paradox. The more uncertainty the market shows, the less uncertainty organisations are willing to tolerate internally. Creativity is filtered out not because it lacks merit, but because it lacks precedent.
At the same time, this doesn’t mean organisations resist change. Quite the opposite. There is often intense pressure to launch “something new” every season. Minor design changes are welcomed. Visual updates are rewarded. Incremental tweaks are celebrated as progress.
What is resisted is not change, but uncertainty.
Most development teams inside bike brands are not structured to create truly new ideas. They are focused on industrialisation, cost control, timelines, and mass-production reliability. Innovation, when it exists, is treated as a side task layered on top of already stretched teams, rather than as a protected core function.
Under these conditions, waiting an extra year to do something fundamentally different feels irresponsible. Shipping something familiar feels safe. The system incentivises motion, not transformation.
Innovation isn’t rejected.
It’s domesticated.
5. Innovation Theater and the Industry Echo Chamber
External industry structures reinforce this behaviour.
Trade shows reward visibility, not vision. Media cycles reward novelty, not consequence. Product awards often celebrate execution within existing templates rather than questioning those templates. Launch calendars dictate rhythm regardless of whether the idea is mature, necessary, or meaningful.
The result is innovation theatre. A continuous performance of progress that looks dynamic but changes very little.
Brands watch each other closely. They reference the same benchmarks, quote the same trends, attend the same panels, read the same reports. Consensus becomes safety, and safety becomes stagnation.
The system does not punish sameness. It punishes deviation. Standing out carries risk. Blending in feels professional.
Ideas that fall outside the accepted narrative are not evaluated on their potential, but on their immediate legibility. Concepts like 32-inch wheels are not rejected because they are proven wrong, but because they do not fit existing frameworks. They are uncomfortable, hard to benchmark, and difficult to explain within current launch cycles and media formats.
So they are ignored, postponed, or quietly dismissed, while safer variations of the same ideas continue to circulate. Not because they are better, but because they are recognisable.
This echo chamber is comfortable, but it is also corrosive. It slowly disconnects the industry from the people it claims to serve.
6. The Western Paralysis
This risk-averse logic has particularly deep roots in Western brands.
Years of risk management have created an instinct to protect rather than challenge. Legacy is treated as something to preserve, not reinterpret. Internal discussions revolve around portfolio complexity, naming conventions, and colour palettes while more fundamental questions remain untouched.
Meanwhile, a new class of competitors has moved beyond the role of efficient followers. As described in earlier Brixen Papers, particularly around the Direct-from-Manufacturer (DfM) model, these players operate with fundamentally different assumptions.
They ship faster because they control more of the value chain. They iterate publicly because feedback loops are short and ownership is clear. They accept imperfection and failure as part of the process because learning happens in-market, not behind closed doors.
This isn’t a geographical argument as much as a structural one. What distinguishes these new competitors is not where they are based, but how they are set up. They do not wait for permission from tradition, nor for validation from industry consensus. They act, observe, adjust, and move again.
The comparison with the automotive sector is uncomfortable but instructive. VW did not lose the EV race because it lacked engineering capability. It lost momentum because it was operating with processes, structures, and decision-making rhythms that had been designed for a different era.
Those processes worked brilliantly for decades. But as technology cycles accelerated and the nature of innovation shifted, they turned from advantage into constraint. VW hesitated not due to lack of talent or know-how, but because legacy structures favoured optimisation, perfection, and internal alignment over speed, learning, and iteration.
While incumbents debated purity and process, others shipped reality, learned in public, and adapted faster. At a certain tipping point, what once made organisations successful becomes the very thing that prevents them from moving forward.
Innovation isn’t defined by who had the idea first. It’s defined by who took the risk and committed early, learned fast, and delivered efficiently.
7. The Real Cost of Playing Safe
The long-term consequences of this behaviour are already visible, even if they’re rarely discussed openly.
When products converge, brands lose pricing power. When differentiation erodes, marketing volume increases but impact decreases. When everything looks similar, price becomes the dominant argument, and margins follow it down.
Over time, brands become dependent on suppliers not only technically, but strategically. They lose authorship. They lose narrative control. They lose the ability to justify their existence beyond distribution reach and promotional spend.
This is not just a cultural problem. It is an economic one. And it also translates to resilience and brand value.
Sameness is expensive. It just hides its cost well.
Where Innovation Actually Happens
When innovation is allowed to expand beyond marginal product features, something important becomes visible. Real differentiation is still possible, but it rarely happens where the industry expects it.
Advanced Bikes showed this when they decided to build their own manufacturing. It was not a marketing move, but a structural one. By reclaiming control over production, they challenged the industry’s dependency model and reasserted authorship. The company ultimately failed and is now rebuilding. That does not invalidate the attempt. It highlights how difficult, and how costly, real differentiation has become in an industry optimised for safety.
Waldbike followed a different path. Similar products, but a fundamentally different go-to-market logic. By selling primarily through car dealerships instead of traditional bike retail, the brand was not innovating the bike, but the context in which it existed. That shift allowed it to reach people the cycling industry rarely addresses, without changing the product narrative dramatically.
Flyer Bikes, in its early years, grew through yet another unconventional route. Tourism rather than classic bike shops. Mobility and use case rather than performance. Experience before specification. That strategic positioning mattered more than any single technical feature.
These examples don’t point to one correct model. They reveal something more important. Innovation becomes meaningful again when brands are willing to rethink the entire system around the product, not just the product itself.
8. What Actually Creates Brand Value
Despite what the industry often claims, technology alone does not create brand value.
Technology enables. It doesn’t define.
Brand value emerges when product, culture, and storytelling reinforce each other in a coherent direction. The product provides credibility. Culture creates belonging. Storytelling gives meaning. Remove any one of these, and the structure goes obsolete.
Many brands attempt to compensate for the absence of one element by exaggerating another. Loud storytelling to mask weak products. Borrowed athlete culture to replace internal identity. Agency-driven narratives to simulate meaning.
This isn’t strategy. It’s substitution.
True innovation begins with a point of view. A belief about what cycling should be, who it is for, and why it matters beyond performance metrics.
9. Innovation as Culture, Not Department
The most innovative brands are not those with the largest R&D budgets or the most aggressive launch schedules. They are the ones that treat innovation as a cultural posture, not as a departmental function.
Innovation cannot be confined to technical development alone. It must exist at an organisational level, shaping how teams are structured, how decisions are made, how products are brought to market, and how brands relate to distribution, sales, and communication. The idea that innovation only happens inside R&D departments is a legacy assumption, and it no longer reflects how the world works.
Truly innovative organisations build teams that challenge each other instead of aligning too quickly. They allow ideas to mature outside quarterly reporting cycles. They test early, fail visibly, and learn before the story is written. This applies as much to product as it does to go-to-market strategies, retail models, and brand behaviour.
Innovation cannot live in isolation from commercial reality, but it cannot be dictated by it either. It requires leadership willing to absorb short-term discomfort across the organisation in exchange for long-term relevance.
The real enemy is comfort, not complexity.
10. The Relevance Test
There’s a simple way to assess whether a brand is truly innovating.
Remove the logo from the bike.
Would anyone still recognise it?
Not because of components or specifications, but because of intent, philosophy, or attitude. And not even only through the product itself.
Because innovation does not have to live in frame shapes or engineering alone. It can exist in how a brand sells, how it works with dealers, how it communicates, how it prices, how it shows up in people’s lives.
Ask a simpler question instead. What does this brand stand for? Why is it different from the next one? What is its reason to exist? And what does it do that others do not?
If those answers are unclear, then innovation is not missing at a design level. It is missing at a meaning level.
True innovation leaves fingerprints. You feel it before you read about it. You understand it without a spec sheet or a sales pitch.
That recognition creates loyalty. Not features. Not numbers. Not claims.
11. What Needs To Change
The industry needs to redefine innovation, not as something new, but as something necessary.
Innovation is not dead because the industry lacks ideas. It is dead because the word has been overused, while the practice has been reduced to marginal product features. In the bicycle segment, innovation is still treated as something that should primarily happen at product level. Most of the conversation revolves around geometry tweaks, weight savings, motor updates, or component iterations that barely change the lived experience of riders.
Meanwhile, innovation in sales models, distribution, communication, marketing, manufacturing logic, target audiences, and business structure is treated as secondary, risky, or simply ignored. That imbalance is the core of the problem. Real differentiation rarely comes from the bike alone anymore. It comes from how brands operate, how they reach people, how they build trust, and how they create meaning beyond features.
This requires three things.
Bravery, to break existing templates instead of endlessly optimising them.
Patience, to build products and communities that outlast launch cycles.
Vision, to prioritise the next decade over the next season.
Because the industry’s biggest limitation is not technological, nor even purely creative. It is structural and behavioural. It lives in how organisations are set up, how decisions are made, how success is measured, and how safety is rewarded. Narrative is only the visible layer of something much deeper.
Innovation is not a press release. It’s a behaviour.
And the future of cycling will not be decided by watts, weights, or wheel sizes, but by those willing to think differently, act earlier, and take responsibility for the consequences. By those who become their own authors, create real differentiation, and step into leadership.
They will have the power to shape the market and create advantage.
The rest will remain paralysed, or simply arrive too late.
That’s what real innovation looks like.
This article is part of the Brixen Bike Papers – a 41 Publishing initiative from our 2025 Think Tank in Brixen, created with the goal of building a better bike world.
A series of essays diving into the uncomfortable truths, hidden opportunities, and real changes our industry needs. Click here for the overview of all released stories.
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Words: Juansi Vivo, Robin Schmitt Photos: Diverse