Читать книгу Innovation in Sport - Bastien Soule - Страница 8

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 is invited to innovate, everywhere and all the time (Gaglio 2017). This “setting in motion” is supported and stimulated by the creation of investment funds, incubators or dedicated places that encourage actors from different backgrounds to “take action” (Mootoosamy 2016), without necessarily attaching great importance to the evaluation of the real positive effects that are brought about, as well as to the collateral effects generated (Godin and Vinck 2017). Entrenched as an ideal, innovation in fact tends to constitute a value in itself – innovate to innovate (Gaglio 2011) – or even an ideology – innovate or perish (Oki 2019) – where stability and conservatism are mostly described in a pejorative way. It refers indiscriminately to everything that is good, new and useful, likely to play a role in the socio-economic and societal challenges facing modern societies (Oki 2019). It is no longer a matter of challenging the established political order, but rather of reinforcing and conforming to it. This sacralization is nothing new: more than 50 years ago, Rogers (1995) pointed out the existence of a “pro-innovation bias” in Western societies, which consisted of considering innovation as fundamentally and systematically positive for the economy and society. We expect innovation, especially innovation based on science and technology, to lead us out of stagnation, or even economic and social crises (Joly 2019; Lechevalier and Laugier 2019). Innovation is said to be economically virtuous: there is indeed a myth according to which the maximization of value obtained through innovation is not merely a source of competitiveness, but also of trickle-down to other spheres of the economy (maintaining employment, protecting social models), according to a very classic but widely contested theory in economics. More broadly, innovation is increasingly seen as the solution to major challenges, in very different sectors (global warming, food security, depletion of natural resources, demographic aging, etc.) (Joly 2019).

Within the sports and active leisure sector, innovation has long been associated with the evolution of practices, equipment and techniques (Vigarello 1988). As early as the 1980s and 1990s, Pociello (1995) emphasized the diversification and hybridization of sports activities, which gave rise to the somewhat undoubtedly excessive (see Passeron 1987), term of “new practices”. In the sporting goods industry, product innovation is presented as a strategic necessity for achieving competitive advantages (Desbordes 2000). It is described as a way of differentiating and stimulating demand by Tjønndal (2016), which is all the more crucial as the sporting goods industry is a highly segmented economic sector, particularly competitive (Hillairet 1999, 2005) and highly subject to fads (Andreff 1985)¹. Since the end of the 2000s, the prospects offered by digital technology have attracted increasing attention. Beyond this strong focus on the technological dimension, which seems to permeate all sectors of activity (Lechevalier and Laugier 2019), innovation in the field of sport also concerns services, processes or events. Moreover, it can be organizational, territorial or social.

For example, research on the federal or public sector focuses on service innovation (Hoeber et al. 2015; Wemmer et al. 2016; Winand et al. 2016). The sports sector, understood here in the broadest sense, thus constitutes a privileged observatory of innovation situations. It provides a glimpse of the many facets of inventive activity, within contexts, organizations and spaces that are themselves very diverse.