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An interview with Bob Murray, president of Sports Science Insights, LLC:

Why did you found Sports Science Insights?

From 1985 until the spring of 2008, I served as the director of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. After leaving Gatorade, I took some time to think about what I’d like to do next. The obvious options were to head back to the corporate world or to academia, but I have already spent considerable time in both environments and concluded that it was time to try something different. Developing a small company from scratch has always interested me, in part because of the many challenges involved in getting it right, but largely because it gives me the opportunity to work on the types of projects that I find most interesting. Our clients range from large, Fortune 500 food and beverage companies, to start-ups, to equipment-and-clothing manufacturers. The common denominator is that they all have challenges related to sports science or sports nutrition. The variety that accompanies those varied interests has really been enjoyable.

What does Sports Science Insights do?

SSI provides scientific insights for performance. That’s shorthand for saying that we help companies identify good ideas and avoid bad ones. I learned from my years on the Gatorade business that even large companies with hundreds of employees are sometimes challenged by the process of identifying and evaluating ideas for new products and ingredients. An objective third party can add value to that process and help expedite decision making.

How does SSI distinguish good ideas from bad ones?

In a word, science. We rely on evidence-based evaluation taxonomy to grade the related scientific literature. That’s no small task in cases where there is a lot of published literature, but it’s the only way to objectively evaluate whether a product or ingredient can deliver on its benefit promise. And it’s certainly the only way to determine where knowledge gaps exist and how to best fill them. For example, if a company is interested in creating a new product around an ingredient that promises a heart-health benefit, SSI can help evaluate the scientific support for that benefit, make recommendations for additional research that might be needed to verify efficacy, and work with the company to craft benefit claims that can be substantiated by competent science.

How does SSI determine what constitutes competent science?

Once again, we rely on science to help us. Competent science is determined in large part by the quality of the available research. In research on humans, experimental designs that are well controlled, randomized, counterbalanced, and double-blind typically produce results in which confidence can be placed. In terms of substantiating product benefits, the strongest support comes from a large number of high-quality studies that show similar results. That’s the best-case scenario, but that’s certainly not the typical scenario. More often than not, product claims are substantiated by a patchwork quilt of evidence. We help companies sort through the evidence and reach a conclusion about the overall strength of the evidence. Is it enough to fully substantiate a benefit claim? Is more research needed? If so, how are R&D dollars best spent? Or is the evidence so weak that the company should walk away?

Walking away from an investment is never easy. How does SSI help companies make those decisions?

My experience is that companies often hold onto bad ideas far too long. The SSI philosophy is one of ruthless evaluation early in the process. Doing so helps avoid the over-promising and under-delivering that accompanies so many new ideas. There’s an understandable emotional investment in a new idea that occurs with the excitement surrounding its inception and subsequent sell-in across the organization. There’s a tangible investment in new ideas that can be quantified in terms of time and money spent on the project. And then there’s the intangible emotional investment where a promising idea is sold into the organization, excitement is generated, marketing, sales, and R&D staff put in time working on downstream details, just to learn months down the road that the idea lacks competent scientific support. These types of dead-end efforts degrade organizational goodwill and put a drain on the spirit of innovation that’s so vital to competitive success. It’s much better to kill bad ideas quickly and devote resources to ideas that are grounded in science. The evidence-based approach that we employ helps accomplish just that.

How does SSI interact with its clients?

It seems obvious and simplistic to say that our goal is to complement what our clients are trying to accomplish, but we work hard to make sure that we provide added value. I have worked with a lot of consulting firms over the years, many of whom did little more than repeat what they learned from company staff. We recognize that companies have internal expertise that we don’t want to duplicate. We build on that expertise to help our clients make evidence-based decisions in which they can have great confidence. There’s something to be said for having an objective third party contribute to the decision-making process because it often removes some of the internal onus associated with making tough decisions.

SSI has clients from a wide range of sports-related businesses that require a similarly wide range of scientific expertise. How do you manage to meet those different needs?

I rely on the network of scientists and business people I’ve met over the years to collaborate with me on projects that require additional expertise. One of the reasons I founded SSI was to create opportunities to continue to work with great people – great personally as well as professionally. When a project comes along and it’s obvious to me that other expertise is needed, I pick up the phone and find that expertise.