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Tsukahara's Vault and Fosbury's Flop: A 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). Organisational 21 March 8, 2008 10:28 WSPC/150-IJIM 00190 22 M. Bar-Eli et al. innovation processes sum up to two major aspects, namely — invention (i.e., the act of discovery) and application (i.e., the act of use) (see Wood et al., 2004). The first aspect is closely related to the process by which novel and useful ideas are generated and produced (i.e., creativity), whereas the second refers mainly to the successful implementation of innovative, new, and creative ideas, products, or processes within an organisation (Rank et al., 2004). Creativity and innovation are important requirements for achievement, with many of the world’s most successful companies (e.g., General Electric, IBM, and Westinghouse) also being the most innovative (Greenberg and Baron, 2003). From a philosophical perspective, a critically thinking rationalist is a person who is also committed to the notion of evaluating behaviour in a critical and reflective man- ner, hoping to find ways of behaving that are well-justified and based on good and coherent reasons. According to this conception, a rational person is often one who breaks with tradition and invents new ways of meeting old challenges; he or she is creative and non-dogmatic in his or her thinking (Bar-Eli et al., 1999). There are two schools of thought regarding the process of radical invention, where a creative and superior technology is introduced unexpectedly (Goldenberg et al., 2004). The first one posits a sudden stroke of ingenuity that follows an extraordinary style of thought, which in turn is regarded as a necessary condition for such performances. The second approach views extraordinarily creative and surprising developments as a “day-to-day” process, whereby even concepts that introduce substantial discontinuities are regarded as the outcome of a continuous and rigorous developmental process. In essence, these two contradictory views also reflect a controversy which is related to the term “creativity”. Some researchers hold that creative thinking is a process which is qualitatively different from ordinary day-to-day thinking, and involves a leap — a “creative spark” — which cannot be adequately formulated, analysed, or reconstructed (e.g., Guilford, 1950; Koestler, 1964; MacKinnon, 1970). In contrast, others maintain that creative products are the outcome of ordinary thinking, only quantitatively different from everyday thinking (e.g., Perkins, 1988; Weisberg, 1992). In fact, the second approach conceives creative problem solving as kind of an “exact science” (Altschuller, 1985), e.g. as a relatively structured thought process (e.g., “constrained stochastic behaviour”; see Simonton, 2003) which is quite systematically reproducible, and therefore is also learnable (Dasgupta, 1994; Maymon and Horowitz, 1999). In sport, creativity is considered a prerequisite for enhanced performance (Bar- Eli et al., 1999; Morris, 2000). However, research in this area has been primarily descriptive, without being closely linked theoretically and/or empirically to the large body of the general and/or sport-specific literature. For example, whereas early researchers (e.g., Loy, 1981) investigated the personality characteristics of sport innovators, others have proposed various techniques for enhancing athletes’ March 8, 2008 10:28 WSPC/150-IJIM 00190 Tsukahara’s Vault and Fosbury’s Flop: A Comparative Analysis of Two Great Inventions 23 creativity (e.g., Bar-Eli, 1991; Mirvis, 1998; Piirto, 1998; Ringrose, 1993; Schmole, 2000), or have examined the effects of such techniques on athletes’ performance (e.g., Everhart et al., 1999; Hanin et al., 2002). A common practice among creativity researchers (see, for review, Simonton, 2003) is to conduct biographical studies of great innovators and discoverers (e.g., Runco and Pritzker, 1999; Schaffer, 1996). This practice reflects the fact that whereas historians of science frequently use significant discoveries as benchmarks of progress, psychologists interested in creativity often use such biographical infor- mation to investigate the process of discovery itself. When the scarcity of research on innovation and creativity in sport is taken into account, the lack of interest in great sport-inventors’ biographies is quite amazing. Recently, Bar-Eli, Goldenberg, and their associates (Bar-Eli et al., 2006; Goldenberg et al., 2004, In Press) intensively investigated the invention of the “Fosbury Flop.” In the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Dick Fosbury — at that time, a relatively unknown high jumper — was victorious in the high jump competition because he broke with tradition and invented an innovative, radically new approach to the high jump which, as a result, utterly revolutionised its style (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2006). Instead of approaching the bar face first as all the other jumpers did, Fosbury — without any advance notice — approached the bar with his back, literally jumping backwards (when compared to the style of all other jumpers). He not only won the gold medal, but also set an Olympic record (official web site of the Olympic Movement, 2006). In less than 10years, all high jumpers adopted this innovative style, with the old technique being rendered passé and the new technique being dubbed “the Fosbury Flop,” after its inventor. Goldenberg et al. (2004, In Press) elaborated on the case of the Fosbury flop, and attempted to demonstrate that radical innovation is not necessarily an outcome of a “creative spark” but rather of a combination of converging abilities and the occurrence of a quite complex, continuous development process. For this purpose, they used an extensively detailed introspective report provided by Fosbury, which intended to provide answers to three basic questions, namely — (a) Could it be that the perception of a revolution is the effect of hindsight, while the real process of creation is a continuous, day-to-day, evolutionary and slow process? (b) Is it possible that a revolutionary concept is a consequence of an evolutionary process of ideation? (c) Do revolutions exist only in the eyes of the adopters rather than in the inventors? Goldenberg et al. (2004, In Press) conducted a qualitative content analysis of Fosbury’s report, in an attempt to examine the possibility that a revo- lutionary and discontinuous invention is, in fact, an evolutionary and continuous process. Bar-Eli et al. (2006), subsequently used this material to draw some impor- tant conclusions related to the issue of the application of the optimisation principle in developing peak sport performance versus the promotion of creativity in such processes. March 8, 2008 10:28 WSPC/150-IJIM 00190 24 M. Bar-Eli et al. The first step in Goldenberg et al.’s (2004, In Press) study was to explore — using sports experts — whether the Fosbury flop is indeed considered a revolutionary phenomenon, that is, the extent to which it constituted an innovation in comparison to other events. From this exploratory step, it emerged that the Fosbury flop was indeed considered one of the most innovative events in sports history across fields. In order to assess the relative importance of the various innovations identified, Goldenberg et al. (In Press) used a questionnaire, which included a variety of questions aimed at measuring the degree of innovation, long-term effect, importance to the specific area, and effect on the field in general. Each of the nine innovations identified in the above-mentioned exploratory step of the study (i.e., Fosbury flop, Tsukahara twist, swimming techniques, fibreglass pole, synthetic track, running shoes, game of soccer,
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