Innovation Navigation host David Robertson wrote an article on Gatorade for the Harvard Business Review blog. The article explains how recent guest Sarah Robb O’Hagan turned around slumping sales at the iconic brand by reconnecting with Gatorade’s core athletic customer and applying the “Third Way” to innovate:

“What Robb O’Hagan did was to apply what we call the Third Way to innovate. Neither incremental improvement of current products, nor radical rethinking of the business, the Third Way focuses on innovating around the current product to make it more valuable.  Robb O’Hagan turned around the product not by changing the product but by complementing it with sports bars, energy chews, and protein shakes. What her team did wasn’t an expansion or revision of the current product; in fact the team reduced the range and number of variants. It also wasn’t a radical rethinking of the product. The Third Way is a different approach to innovation.”

Read more of “How Gatorade Invented New Products by Revisiting Old Ones”  at the Harvard Business Review.