Productivity stories show up in the strangest places, and if you’re a hockey fan, here’s one for you.
Some innovations save labor, others increase revenue. Truly great ones do both. To wit, the Zamboni. You’re no doubt familiar with this machine that resurfaces an entire ice rink in just a few minutes. Rink ice is only a few inches thick and easily damaged. Without frequent resurfacing the ice can become rough and difficult as well as unsafe to skate.
Before the Zamboni, Resurfacing a typical rink would require five people an hour and a half to resurface during which no paying customers could use the rink; “and when they finished, you had five employees standing around with nothing to do until the next resurfacing.”
One frustrated rink owner, Frank Zamboni, decided there had to be a better way and focused his mechanical aptitude on the problem. The Zamboni was the result. This invention had a powerful effect on ice sports by dramatically reducing the cost of rink maintenance and increasing the amount of time ice time available to skaters.
Take a few minutes for a story about innovation applied to sports by a man who was forced in to the business of selling ice time when new technology make his old business of making ice obsolete. Find out how the Zamboni revolutionized fun on the ice ”and why “in the world of ice sports, it was….on par with that of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”
