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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Managing Innovation in the Sports Equipment Industry: Upstream Process Management
Author(s)
Yann Abdourazakou
Full-Text PDF
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DOI:10.17265/2328-2185/2016.01.001
Affiliation(s)
Yann Abdourazakou, Ph.D., associate professor, California State University, Dominguez Hills, USA.
ABSTRACT
The point under study is the first of such a nature. This paper investigates the management of innovation adopted by the European leader in sports equipment: Decathlon (Oxylane Group). In recent years, vertical integration push and innovation have secured the company’s leadership and success in a number of sports markets throughout Europe. It now has 909 stores located globally. Oxylane Group designs, manufactures, and sells sports products for sports people worldwide. It offers fitness, dance, gymnastics, and combat sports products; bicycles, equipment, and accessories; team sports products; nautical and water sports products (surf sports, diving, sailing, and kayaking products); swimming products; mountain sports products (for hiking, mountain trailing, camping, skiing, and snow shoe hiking); skiing and snowboarding products (for snowboarders and skiers); and climbing and mountaineering products. The company is now a direct challenger for world sports leaders. Since the end of the 1990’s, Decathlon different sports brands have not taken a unique and rational path to success. The company has built insights about its customers, identified and evaluated unique market opportunities, and prepared a bold game plan to seize them. By doing so, Decathlon has developed a stream of winning products. The process of new business creation generally splits into two parts: an upstream process (sensing and creating opportunities) and a downstream process (converting the selected opportunities into successful products). Most businesses have a formal process implemented to manage the downstream part. Few that people know of have set up an equivalent process like Oxylane and Decathlon to sense and create new opportunities in the sports equipment industry. The aim of the paper is to examine how the brand has developed two of its successful product: the tent two seconds and the wetsuit “Inergy”. These two products are chosen as examples to understand how the upstream process articulate with the downstream one.
KEYWORDS
innovation, sports equipment, process, management
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