Innovation in Sport. Bastien Soule

      Introduction

      I.1. Desacralizing innovation

      Innovation stories tend to be idealized in a fairly classic pattern, which unfolds as follows: a bright or avant-garde idea carried by a figurehead; a rapid succession of steps allowing for smooth development; a positive outcome sometimes carrying the seeds of a “real transformation”. This is hardly surprising when attention is focused on successes and, moreover, when these are reported (notably to journalists) by companies and their spokespersons (Vinsel 2017). To succumb to this form of storytelling is more surprising for some researchers, who are supposed to show more distance but who ultimately follow this type of description, which contributes to shaping and maintaining a virtuous and linear vision of innovation, far from what more rigorous analyses reveal.

For anyone who intends to tell the story of innovation, the question of access to information is central. However, one of the limits of success stories is linked to the quality of the informants: through the voices of their executives and R&D managers, companies engage in communication exercises that promote their image, their mastery and their know-how in innovation. When the descriptions are backed up by diversified sources, the depth of the information gathered almost systematically leads to a departure from the usual narratives and the tenacious myths of the visionary innovator (Callon 1994) and of linearity (Joly 2019). Surprising pathways are revealed: the emergence of the concept and the origin of the invention become blurred; the sources of innovation are multiple; hesitations and forks in the road, starting from and around the initial project, are frequent; time is stretched out, and booms follow periods of inertia; control over the spread of the innovation is partial; and so on. These “surprises”, which reflect the complexity of innovation processes, in fact point to an invariant: trajectories are rarely linear, and the control exercised over innovative projects is relative.

      For all these reasons, this handbook does not constitute a guide to sports innovation management prescribing “good practices” in this area. Seeking to innovate means venturing into unknown territory, confronting contingency and the risk of failure, having to accept changes or a loss of control, and, in the best cast scenario, being patient and convincing in order to achieve more or less lasting success. These are all elements that should not overestimate the control exercised over innovation trajectories (Bauer 2017).

      Modestly, not for lack of ambition but because the facts are stubborn, this book therefore merely aims to provide an interpretive framework intended to facilitate the description and understanding of the processes that have led to innovations in the field of sport. The approach is resolutely illustrative: in order to encourage appropriation by example, we have drawn on about 20 cases of sports innovations. Some of these cases are used on an ad hoc basis to facilitate the understanding of the theoretical aspects mentioned in the first chapter of the book; others, in the third chapter, are examined in greater detail in order to relate the trajectory of innovation, in all its depth, over time.

      In this way, we intend to demonstrate the interest of the proposed interpretive framework, in particular its heuristic character, in producing realistic explanations of the innovation processes at work in the sports sector. These cases are borrowed from work carried out by students of the Master 2 Management of Sports Organizations at the University of Lyon, as part of a course on the sociology of sports innovation taught by several university lecturers and researchers who are members of the L-ViS (Laboratoire sur les vulnérabilités et l’innovation dans le sport, Laboratory on Vulnerabilities and Innovation in Sport), a research team focused on the study of innovation in sport.

      I.2. The importance of innovation in sports

The current confidence in the benefits of innovation for contemporary societies and their economies verges on belief (Sveiby 2017). This is evidenced by the calls for continuous innovation, in every field of activity, as well as the ever-increasing number of schemes to support and stimulate it. Innovation is almost unanimously considered the sine qua non for companies’ competitiveness, and even for their survival.

      Historians will remind us that innovation has not always been placed on a pedestal in this way. Prior to the 19th century, it was even equated with a much-maligned form of transgression, a challenge to the established order and to religious and political balances (Godin 2017). Supposedly exceptional, emanating from the sacred and the divine, conceptualizing was shunned. To be innovative was indeed to be a troublemaker, even a heretic (Godin 2012).

      It was only in the 19th century that innovation began to take on a positive connotation, in contrast with conservatism, customs and tradition. This meaning of the term is still very structuring in the way we think about innovation today. It has come to resemble a dogma that has replaced the myth of progress, which has been more and more seriously undermined over the course of the 20th century (Taguieff 2001) and in particular in the 1980s and 1990s (Lechevalier and Laugier 2019). It is associated with originality, difference and creativity, and tends to be seen as a source of “magical” solutions to all sorts of social problems (Oki 2019). Thus, innovating has become a socio-political injunction designed to free us from the economic crisis, thanks to the supposed capacity of innovation to create value and employment. “Innovation has become the emblem of modern society, a panacea for solving all problems,” summarizes Godin (2008, p. 5).

Nowadays, everyone