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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.