Engineering students at the University of Colorado Denver soon will have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience testing outdoors gear with precision machinery in a newly created “innovation laboratory” through a partnership with Outside Interactive Inc., the Boulder-based media company that is home to more than 30 online platforms, including Outside magazine.
Officially called The Outside Lab at CU Denver, its mission will be to provide a space where faculty, students, Outside editors and entrepreneurs in the outdoors industry can test skiing, running, hiking gear and other outdoors equipment using highly sophisticated machinery.
Outside will use laboratory findings to enhance gear review features across its platforms by introducing objective testing data to augment subjective field tests, while students will gain valuable experience operating in a laboratory setting, the university said.
“They might create the next Gore-Tex,” said Outside chief executive Robin Thurston, a CU Denver grad. “Obviously we already have a very robust outdoor industry, but it creates an opportunity for even more start-ups and outdoor companies to come to Colorado for a whole number of reasons — for brands, for individual entrepreneurs — and ultimately all this will benefit the consumer because they’re going to end up getting better products, more innovative products, better materials, even crash-testing for helmets.
“CU has really taken a visionary position on this, on how to get diverse students into the lab, how to expose the lab to their engineering department, as well as other programs,” he added.
Colorado’s outdoor industry has a $9.6-billion impact on the state’s GDP annually, according to the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade.
The College of Engineering, Design and Computing will manage the lab, which received $200,000 from the Colorado State Outdoor Recreation Grant Program, according to Conor Hall, director of Colorado’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office.
The college already has some testing equipment, according to Dean Martin L. Dunn, but much more is coming. “We’re kind of working on things ranging from behavior of wear of shoes to behavior of skis, helmets, even an area we’re soon going to be ramping up, (testing) permeability and behavior of garments,” Dunn said.
“Being able to exercise our engineering chops on really cool products that students will be able to see in a few months, when they’re at the ski lift seeing a pair of skis and saying, ‘Hey, I worked on those skis in the lab,’” he added.
The seed of the idea came from Thurston, who was chief digital officer at Under Armour, a sportswear company, from 2013-16.
“We had a very robust, amazing innovation lab,” Thurston recalled. “It was everything from 3D printing to reliability testing to fabric testing in heat and cold rooms. Having had the experience of seeing an innovation lab like that, I felt like there was a big opportunity to have something that was more open to the industry as a whole, a place where start-up founders could potentially come and test their products, a place for Outside to do more in-depth reviews similar to a Consumer Reports — which does a lot of lab testing on products — but in the outdoor category. CU Denver was just the perfect partner for that.”
For example, Outside gear guru Will Taylor foresees being able to measure the flex and torsional stiffness of skis with a machine that can test a lot of skis in a short period of time. That data can be combined with subjective on-mountain testing conducted by teams of Outside’s expert skiers, which is how skis have been tested for gear reviews for decades.
“You’re bringing those two things together to create very compelling results for our readership,” Taylor said. “We can be like, ‘OK, we felt this ski flex this way on the mountain. We think it compares with this other ski in this way.’ Now we’re going to be able to go to the lab and test that and see if we’re right. Our goal is to give the best objective gear reviews that we can. This takes us light years ahead of where we were before.”
Another machine will be able to test the durability of hiking boots, trail running shoes and road running shoes by simulating the human gait in hiking and running over hundreds of miles in a matter of days to identify the most durable footwear.
“You can take measurements of how the midsole has been affected, how the traction on the bottom has been affected, whether things are wearing evenly or not,” Taylor said.
Students will benefit by gaining experience that is hard to get elsewhere, preparing them for jobs at outdoors industry giants such as Patagonia and VF, a Denver-based outdoors company that includes The North Face, JanSport, Timberland, Eastpak, Smartwool and Vans.
“The student part of it is super cool,” Taylor said. “Engineers that I’ve talked to, these are outdoors people that are like, ‘We wish we had this opportunity when we were in college, that we could touch these machines, work with them, instead of having to get on-the-job training.’ We’re really hoping we can provide a well-trained workforce for people like VF, or maybe it’s one person who’s building bike frames and can use someone who knows how to use the equipment so they can test that stuff. There’s a multitude of ways a student with that training could go into the work force.”
Facilitating the lab at CU Denver fits with the mission of the state’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office to attract outdoor industry players to Colorado. The grant from the state will be used largely for purchasing more testing equipment.
“In this industry, the big players — the VFs and Patagonias of the world — have their own gear testing labs, but very few others do,” Hall said. “They don’t have the size and economies of scale to make that practical. It’s a great opportunity for our industry here, and a really attractive thing for companies looking to come to Colorado. We see the value in this, and we’re going to do everything we can to help this effort succeed.”