March 8, 2008 10:28 WSPC/150-IJIM 00190 International Journal of Innovation Management Vol. 12, No. 1 (March 2008) pp. 21–39 © Imperial College Press TSUKAHARA’S VAULT AND FOSBURY’S FLOP: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TWO GREAT INVENTIONS MICHAEL BAR-ELI∗;§, ODED LOWENGART∗, MITSUO TSUKAHARA† and RICHARD DOUGLAS FOSBURY‡ ∗Department of Business Administration School of Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel §
[email protected] †Tsukara Gymnastics Center, 5-8-12 Kitakarasuyama Setagaya-Ku, Tokyo 157-0061, Japan ‡Galena Engineering, Inc., 680 Second Avenue North P.O. B. 425, Ketchum, Idaho, USA Studies on innovation and creativity have been quite rare, thus far in the sport manage- ment literature. In this study, a comparative analysis was conducted between two great inventions — Tsukahara’s Vault and Fosbury’s Flop. Mitsuo Tsukahara and Dick Fosbury responded to open-ended questions designed to capture various dimensions in the develop- ment of their innovations. A content analysis was conducted on the data obtained through this semi-structured interview technique. The comparison between these two cases revealed an amazingly similar pattern in the structure of the innovative process. The major conclusion drawn from this analysis is that the principles of optimisation and creativity-enhancement should be conceived as being complimentary, in the promotion of innovative processes in various areas. Keywords: Innovation; creativity; evolution; incremental process. Introduction In the management science literature, “innovation” has been defined as a new idea applied to initiating or improving a product, process, or service (Kanter, 1988; Van de Ven, 1986). Novel ideas and innovative decisions are sometimes required as part of a well-functioning organisational culture (Schein, 1999; Schneider, 1990) in order to cope with organisational situations that have no precedent, or when no “off- the-shelf” solutions are available (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2004).