in different forms of sports itinerancy illustrates the great creativity of even the most ordinary sportsmen and women: repackaging, using things for different purposes, fashioning things themselves, etc. (Boutroy and Vignal 2018).
Beyond the questioning of the monopoly of innovation capacities held by industrialists alone and the demonstration of the specific functioning of lead user communities, the essential contribution of the LUT is to show how companies can be inspired and fed by users’ achievements. Cases of co-production with lead users are not rare. This process of open innovation provides manufacturers with a wealth of information on the contexts of use, which would be difficult to access by other means (for example, a series of formal tests). In this respect, user creativity is a positive externality for the commercial world, which may have an interest in developing processes of innovation through use.
1.2.2. Innovation through use: user participation
Making the user a partner in innovation is not a new idea. The approach is the result of the observation that 80 to 90% of innovation attempts (whether they be products or services) end in failure. There are many different approaches to innovation that implicate users (innovation through use, user-centered approach, etc.). Whatever the favored one, innovation is thought of as an iterative and whirlwind-like process, during which a good, a service or a process encounters users, or not. The challenge is, of course, to encourage this adoption.
Faced with the order to innovate, recourse to the sociology of uses (Akrich and Méadel 2004) makes it possible to accompany the action, particularly in the case of disruptive innovations (Cardon 1997). The user then becomes a kind of useful resource for innovation actors (designers, marketers, etc.), as they can reduce risks by testing and validating ergonomic or technological choices as early as possible, for example. Ultimately, it is a matter of optimizing the creation of value and ensuring its perception. Any reusability is only possible if the user is interested in the object or service, and if we can verify that its use makes sense in his daily life. This perspective reflects renunciation into technical determinism, whereby the user is no longer considered a passive being nor a docile absorber of an innovative proposal.
Research on usage shows that usage does not exist in a desert of use and that the adoption of a good, in particular, is built around previous techniques and practices (Mallein and Toussaint 1994). Use is also social, since it develops over time and often comes up against the resistance of the social body and the weight of habits and tradition, which regularly thwart the diffusion of innovation (Perriault 1989). The value of the innovation is thus constructed by the meaning of favorable uses.
Depending on the approach, the question of usage can be raised at certain key points (usage-based approach) or during each of the major phases of the innovation process, that is anticipation, design, adaptation and adoption (user-centered approach). For each of these phases, specific tools from the human and social sciences and dedicated devices (places of interaction, co-creation platforms, test prototypes and usage analyses) are deployed in order to anticipate the technical requirements of users and their social and cultural anchoring. Finally, these methods allow for concrete tests, within the ordinary environment of practice, in order to study the ways of doing things, the resistances, and also the new configurations employed (appropriations, other uses or “misuses”).
1.2.3. Co-creating value: the consumer at the heart of innovation
The participation of users in innovative processes is an important factor in the success of an innovation, particularly during the ideation, testing (concept, prototype) and marketing phases (Gatignon et al. 2016). The various forms of open innovation that we have just described also refer to a certain heterogeneity of terms: depending on the case, we speak of involvement, participation or even co-production.
A more recent paradigm – value co-creation (VCC) – is also interested in these interactions between companies and consumers but goes further in recognizing the active role of the latter (Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008). This approach reverses the classical perspectives to postulate that value is generated not by companies (which only make value propositions), but by consumers during their participation and then use. An organization therefore becomes co-creative if it reinforces its interactions with users, in order to foster the iterative emergence of value-generating propositions for end users (Grönroos 2011). Interactions do not aim to change the consumer, but on the contrary to transform the company.
Although VCC is receiving increasing attention in sports, it has not been used in the context of innovation case studies. However, in an indirect way, most of the work focuses on the co-creation of value around novelties. Kolyperas et al. (2019) synthesized how fans (understood as engaged consumers) determine the value of propositions (e.g. “GoPro Be a Hero”, through users’ productions, narratives and broadcasts). According to them, this is done through operations of evaluation (role of assimilator), creation (role of adapter) and positioning (role of authenticator). These mechanisms very often move value propositions “in directions that were not foreseen or explored by the brand itself” (Kolyperas et al. 2019, p. 213). These elements confirm, if necessary, that the value of an innovation cannot be defined a priori by the providers but is constantly redefined a posteriori and in a contextualized manner by consumers.
Fostering consumer-centric interactive approaches should not be idealized as it does not protect against a symmetrical phenomenon of value co-destruction through misuse (Plé and Chumpitaz Cáceres 2010), resistance (fan protests in sports shows, see (Stieler et al. 2014)), or loss of value for other stakeholders. Boutroy and Bodet (2017) showed, for example, how an innovation process based on a strong co-creative approach adopted by a sports goods manufacturer (relying on its fan community) failed to succeed owing to the co-destruction of value for ordinary consumers as much as for intermediaries. Focusing on the Nike Run Club mobile sports app, Charitsis et al. (2018) also show that the co-creator of value can be somewhat unknowingly co-creative, as the data harvested on their physical activity is subject to secondary use by the producers of these apps.
In this respect, it remains important to move beyond the company-consumer dyad to take into account all interacting stakeholders (Woratschek et al. 2014), relying in particular on the notion of stakeholder network, as Grohs et al. (2020)3 did in the case of sports events.
KEY POINTS – The contrast with classical approaches to innovation is significant. Von Hippel and his colleagues take the opposite stance on the still widespread view that innovation comes exclusively from industry and its entrepreneurs, from the identification of markets to the propagation of novelty. The LUT makes it possible to highlight the importance of more ordinary actors on the periphery of productive systems by taking into account the role of users (described as growing, to the point of evoking a “democratization of innovation”). However, it is important not to misunderstand the main interest of this inverted model of innovation: it is true that lead users occasionally take the place of industrialists; but in a more structural way, they provide them with valuable information about expert uses, without which many industrially produced innovations would not see the light of day or would prove to be out of step with the needs emerging from the field. Finally, one may wonder whether the LUT does not stimulate more reflection on ideation and invention than on innovation as a whole. The increasing attention paid to different forms of open innovation signals a desire on the part of companies to integrate consumers as actors of creativity. This may involve encouraging interactions with different categories of users (user-driven approach), or even making the company a simple facilitator of the co-creation of value by consumers (VCC). These elements open up the possibility of substituting the top-down innovation scheme with a more bottom-up conception with the LUT, or even more horizontal and whirling in other cases (Gaglio 2011).
THE LIMITS OF THESE APPROACHES – While this approach has led to decisive advances, it leaves some questions unanswered. By emphasizing the primary role of lead users, the proponents of the LUT
