Читать книгу Innovation in Sport - Bastien Soule - Страница 7

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.