Читать книгу Innovation in Sport. Innovation Trajectories and Process Optimization онлайн

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By definition, the number of user-innovators is greater than the number of people working in the R&D departments of companies in the sports sector. Beyond the diversity of needs expressed by this mass of sportsmen and women, another element that explains the effectiveness of these communities, in terms of innovation, can be evoked: technical expertise and cognitive diversity are a source of creativity. Von Hippel supports the idea that innovation is all the more effective when it is elaborated collectively; on the one hand, through the successive addition of improvements and transformations made by others; on the other hand, because of the heterogeneity of needs and the capacity of users to imagine solutions to lead to a stable (and generalizable) form of progress. The collective activity of lead users, especially when mediated by structured communities of practice, offers manufacturers a large amount of information about the stated needs, envisaged solutions, and, indirectly, potential markets. This information is all the more useful to manufacturers because it is either unavailable or extremely costly to obtain. Sometimes, companies only have to reproduce prototypes developed and progressively optimized in this way, thanks to the virtues of this “distributed innovation”.