Innovation in Sport. Bastien Soule

role of successive adopters, starting with champions, expert skiers, high-end customers and then regular skiers. Conversely, Trabal (2008) reveals the effects of social resistance to innovation within the French canoeing federation: a new form of competition kayak, technically optimal, was not taken up because it was not compatible with what certain key actors in the system (the first adopters: coaches, elite athletes) perceived as technical progress.

      Classical approaches in sociology are therefore interested in the intrinsic properties of objects in order to deduce their advantages and disadvantages in relation to the social or cultural context in which they are received. Innovation spreads (or doesn’t spread) in a more or less receptive environment and makes it evolve or transforms itself to respond to major trends. This is how the relatively rapid adoption of the fiberglass pole vault in the 1960s was analyzed (Defrance 1984). However, in spite of obvious relative advantages compared to the previous solutions (bamboo or metal poles), it is again the compatibility with the traditional definition of the activity (body techniques, the spectacle on show, the validity of records) that is debated. For Defrance, the context (ideology of progress) and the adoption of the fiber in other countries obliged the French athletes to imitate. But if the contextual dimension of an acceptance or rejection is undeniable, the mechanisms of adoption (or rejection) are not always made explicit.

      Thus, Martha’s (2006) account of technological innovations modifying BASE jump practices only partially describes how practitioners became interested in the invention. As a result, she hardly discusses how the invention was not only adopted, but adapted to a physical environment (take-off site, air) and social environment (uses, techniques, conceptions), which were both evolving together.

KEY POINTS – The studies included in this first set of theories have the merit of highlighting the role of social factors and the influence of the global innovation environment. They sometimes deal with cases of resistance or failure to spread, which can be considered as failures. From this point of view, innovation appears less as a result than as a process; it is not limited to the emergence of a novelty, however ingenious it may be, and only succeeds when it is adopted by an environment and goes hand in hand with the renewal of social practices as much as of productive systems. Such works have thus made it possible to anchor technical constraints in their social, economic and cultural contexts, in order to underline the complexity and the progressiveness of the processes of sports innovations (Vigarello 1988; Chantelat 1993; Pociello 1995). The five factors that facilitate diffusion (relative advantage, compatibility, simplicity, trialability and observability) also constitute a solid basis for analyzing the downstream phase of innovation trajectories.

      THE LIMITS OF THESE APPROACHES – Schumpeterian thinking remains marked by a conception of innovation centered on the suppliers and their products¹, with the adopters appearing as relatively passive agents. Boullier (1989) in turn underlines the imprint of these reductions in the diffusionist theory. Focusing on the acceptance of the novelty, the analysis neglects what happens upstream, as well as the influence that users can have on the genesis of the innovation. More broadly, this point of view is in some ways linear and unidirectional (top down, from the producer to the consumers, from the elites to the ordinary users, from the center to the periphery). It does not completely escape determinism, obscuring certain contingency effects, uncertainties and the sinuosity of real innovation stories. Finally, the focus on a main actor (whether an entrepreneur or a pioneering organization) seems in some cases excessive (falling under the “myth of origins” pointed out by Callon (1994)), whereas stakeholders with multiple roles generally take part in innovation processes. Bauer (2017) also questions certain diffusionist assumptions: the anchoring of the novelty in a single, specific place; the need for rapid spread; the only temporary nature of possible rejections; or the absence of evolution (or only at the margin) of innovations during the diffusion process. Rogers (1995) also recognized the unrealistic nature of most diffusionist assumptions, especially since they are based on the study of a carefully selected set of success stories.

1.2. Approaches based on uses and users

      Sportsmen and women (whether experts or “ordinary” sportsmen and women) are not the subject of much attention by the authors mentioned so far: “second roles”: they often appear as simple recipients who accept or don’t accept an innovation, either as a trailblazer or a follower. Innovation is still thought of as a closed process, carried out by organizations (generally companies). In this sense, the main role attributed to the user is to have needs that the manufacturer tries to identify, to fill or even to transform by designing new products.

      However, it has now been proven that consumers are not passive: they appropriate goods (even the most standardized ones) through their “arts of doing” (de Certeau 1990), and they are creative through their “techniques of use” (Julien and Rosselin 2005). For their part, the management sciences have clearly shown how much the consumer participates in the processes of servuction, and even production (Vernette and Tissier-Desbordes 2012).

      Moreover, it is possible to consider users as actors in innovation, given their capacity to move, adapt, extend, divert and transform novelties and their prescribed uses (Akrich 1998). This is by no means to postulate an absolute symmetry between designer and consumer (Flichy 2003), but simply to note that there is no watertight barrier between design, production and use – which are all sources of creativity.

      1.2.1. The lead-user theory: the user-innovator

      The consumer may seem to be nothing more than a tactician, capable of playing with innovations designed by market professionals. By developing the lead-user theory (LUT), Von Hippel (2005) pushes the consideration of the user to the point of affording him or her a “lead role” in the innovation process. More so than the early adopter, according to Rogers, who approves or diverts manufacturers’ innovations, the lead user is a developer of specific products or services that the market does not yet know how to use or does not yet want to use. Von Hippel was interested in lead users (or “pioneer users”) in the creation of “informational goods” (such as software), but also in the manufacture of “material goods”, with a particular focus on the sports sector, which is teeming with creativity carried by these user-innovators.

The lead user is generally an expert in the activity concerned, but he is also characterized by a willingness to tinker. He may even rationalize the process to the point of creating a “mock laboratory” to test and compare different solutions. He also sometimes seizes the opportunity to use his close circle and/or custom manufacturers to obtain resources. Although important compromises are made at this stage (due to time, money, etc.), this low-cost innovation niche is likely to produce prototypes with novel functionalities. The solutions thus generated are generally shared with other users who will examine them, comment on them, imitate them, test them and eventually appropriate them (modifying and enriching them in the process, in many cases). This sharing, based on a free and generalized free access opposed to intellectual protection (close to the open-source movements (Von Hippel 2013)), is very frequent among most lead users². Favoring the dissemination and circulation of knowledge, their approach is not necessarily disinterested because it is the source of symbolic benefits (recognition, notoriety, status) within communities of practice.

By definition, the number of user-innovators is greater than the number of people working in the R&D departments of companies in the sports sector. Beyond the diversity of needs expressed by this mass of sportsmen and women, another element that explains the effectiveness of these communities, in terms of innovation, can be evoked: technical expertise and cognitive diversity are a source of creativity. Von Hippel supports the idea that innovation is all the more effective when it is elaborated collectively; on the one hand, through the successive addition of improvements and transformations made by others; on the other hand, because of the heterogeneity of needs and the capacity of users to imagine solutions to lead to a stable (and generalizable) form of progress. The collective activity of lead users, especially when mediated by structured communities of practice, offers manufacturers a large amount of information about the stated needs, envisaged solutions, and, indirectly, potential markets. This information is all the more