Innovation in Sport. Bastien Soule

data harvested on their physical activity is subject to secondary use by the producers of these apps.

      In this respect, it remains important to move beyond the company-consumer dyad to take into account all interacting stakeholders (Woratschek et al. 2014), relying in particular on the notion of stakeholder network, as Grohs et al. (2020)³ did in the case of sports events.

KEY POINTS – The contrast with classical approaches to innovation is significant. Von Hippel and his colleagues take the opposite stance on the still widespread view that innovation comes exclusively from industry and its entrepreneurs, from the identification of markets to the propagation of novelty. The LUT makes it possible to highlight the importance of more ordinary actors on the periphery of productive systems by taking into account the role of users (described as growing, to the point of evoking a “democratization of innovation”). However, it is important not to misunderstand the main interest of this inverted model of innovation: it is true that lead users occasionally take the place of industrialists; but in a more structural way, they provide them with valuable information about expert uses, without which many industrially produced innovations would not see the light of day or would prove to be out of step with the needs emerging from the field. Finally, one may wonder whether the LUT does not stimulate more reflection on ideation and invention than on innovation as a whole. The increasing attention paid to different forms of open innovation signals a desire on the part of companies to integrate consumers as actors of creativity. This may involve encouraging interactions with different categories of users (user-driven approach), or even making the company a simple facilitator of the co-creation of value by consumers (VCC). These elements open up the possibility of substituting the top-down innovation scheme with a more bottom-up conception with the LUT, or even more horizontal and whirling in other cases (Gaglio 2011).

      THE LIMITS OF THESE APPROACHES – While this approach has led to decisive advances, it leaves some questions unanswered. By emphasizing the primary role of lead users, the proponents of the LUT sometimes come to underestimate the structuring role of the traditional actors of innovation (companies, laboratories, etc.). In a way, they reactivate a new incarnation of the heroic figure (the lead users, the communities of practitioners resemble the “disinterested enthusiast” of the mythology of innovation analyzed by (Callon 1994)), which displaces, rather than overcomes, the emphasis placed on a central actor in the innovation process. The role and objectives of the users appear to be quite heterogeneous, just like the forms of relations that are established with the manufacturers and their representatives. Some of the innovations described are in fact similar to “simple” customizations, which are, after all, quite classic in the phase of appropriation of serial equipment or material. Open innovation is certainly part of a more egalitarian dyadic relationship between companies and users, but it is not a miracle solution. There are many consumers and their needs are evolving. What’s more, listening too much to certain users can destroy value for other users and even other stakeholders. Innovation is a collective activity that requires going beyond the organization-consumer dyad to take into account the wider network of actors who will support it, as well as the many material and technical elements that will influence the fate of a new product.

1.3. The socio-technical approach to innovation: networks and attachment

      The socio-technical analysis of innovations makes it possible to enrich the previous contributions, in particular by going beyond the overly pronounced focus on certain components of the systems: the entrepreneur, the technical object, the user, etc. According to this relational approach, the success of an innovation depends above all on the progressive construction of a network of stakeholders who will support it and give it substance. It is therefore understandable that the central issue becomes recruiting allies, identifying their expectations and translating the project in such a way as to interest them (Akrich et al. 1988a, 2006). The originality of this point of view is summed up in the following statement, which is rather iconoclastic with regard to the usual sacralization of the inventor: the fate of an innovation does not depend so much on the intrinsic qualities of the idea or the object conceived as on the solidity and breadth of the chain that will support it. Innovating therefore consists of building and maintaining a chain of association that is increasingly extended, solid and stable, by attracting and recruiting new actors. Kline and Rosenberg (1986) develop a vision of innovation as an interactive process, or chain-linked model, compatible with the socio-technical approach. The consensus that has gradually taken hold in the academic sphere around this collective and systemic understanding of innovation has not prevented institutions responsible for innovation policies from maintaining approaches that are too linear and/or focused on a few key actors (Joly 2019).

      In order to develop and strengthen the innovation network, one must regularly agree to transform the project into a new form acceptable to new entrants. The adoption of an innovation thus goes hand in hand with an adaptation, or even a reinvention of the “product” (which (Gaglio 2011) summarized through the neologism “adaptation”). Moreover, recruiting or losing an actor leads to a new network, which is likely to reconfigure the project. At each stage, “the innovation is transformed, redefining its properties and its public” (Akrich et al. 1988b, p. 31). This approach does not prejudge the decisive role of any one actor (who may be quite ordinary: a prototypist, a salesperson, a supplier, a client, etc.), especially since his or her influence may vary considerably from one stage to another. Moreover, many innovation trajectories develop despite the exit of the inventor’s network or of a key player from the beginning.

It is thus necessary to avoid the trap of reconstruction in the form of a success story, with its classic ingredients: passionate and determined innovators; their promising intuitions stubbornly propagated toward a demand (initially reticent, then benevolent); a concept or product that is “already there” that only needs to be refined to overcome technical difficulties or customer reticence, etc. However, even to understand a posteriori a success story, one must try to refuse a finalistic explanation: the receiving society, the convinced market, the controlled efficiency or profitability. “It is impossible to use the end of the story to explain its beginning and its course” (Latour et al. 1991, p. 462). It is therefore a question of starting again from the beginning of the story, in a pragmatic way, in order to describe and understand its extensions, its reversals and its adhesions; that is to say, “to explain its elaboration without assuming it to be acquired” (Latour and Callon 1990, p. 23). A first principle of symmetry follows from this: to consider the innovation under construction, without prejudging its success or failure (which must be explained in the same way), which Trabal (1999) has underlined the importance of in the sports sector. Hence the interest of innovation narratives in process studies (innovation in the making) (Hoholm and Araujo 2011), a trend that invites us to look at trajectories that are still unstable, or in the process of stabilization, rather than at the already stabilized products and the formalized collectives that underlie them. Hence the importance of works that are interested in this way in innovations that have not met their market or penetrated society (Latour 1992). This perspective can be compared with the contributions of Latour (1989), who very early on was sensitive to science in action, that is to say in the process of being made. It is indeed a way of capturing and then showing the experiences and actions of all stakeholders in the face of opportunities, uncertainties, disagreements and trade-offs to be made (Hoholm and Araujo 2011).

In innovation studies, materiality is generally taken into account, but in a somewhat reductive way. To put it simply, technical determinism makes it an obstacle (to be overcome or bypassed), the techno-centric approach focuses on functionality (to be domesticated), and diffusionism considers material elements as static and malleable entities. A second symmetry, embodied in the very notion of sociotechnics, allows the theory we are interested in to go further: the material or technical dimensions cannot be separated from the social dimensions. An innovation network is thus conceived as an assembly of human actors and non-human elements: materials, objects, prototypes, workshops, environments of use or diffusion, plans, regulatory texts, etc. On both sides, interests or constraints are redefined according to the context and concrete uses. Such a conception can seem destabilizing, but it allows us “to take the non-humans out of a status oscillating between