The World Track and Field Championships are coming soon (July 15-24, 2022), and for the first time ever, the United States is the host country! The event will take place at Hayward Field on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. The World Championships usually take place only in odd years, but the event was re-scheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and one-year delay of the Tokyo Olympics. Track and Field is usually a very popular event at the Olympics, so I suspect that even the casual sports fan will be at least somewhat familiar with all of the events that will be taking place.
If you do happen to watch the World Championships, pay particularly close attention the high jump event. As you watch, you will notice that almost every single athlete uses the exact same technique. It's called the "Fosbury Flop" (after the man who developed it, Dick Fosbury), and it revolutionized the high jump event in the sport of Track and Field. When you study closely what happened with the high jump over its long history, it's easy to see that the "Fosbury Flop" truly represented a revolution as opposed to an evolution. No one was using a technique even remotely similar to it until Dick Fosbury introduced it at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. In less than 10 years after that Olympics, everyone was using the technique and the world records continued to fall.
Most of the management literature describes two kinds of innovation - incremental and radical. Incremental innovations come about through serial, step-by-step advances, while radical innovations (also known as discontinuous innovation) originate with a sudden stroke of ingenuity (a "spark of genius") followed by a revolution in thinking. In other words, incremental innovation is similar to the slow evolution of an idea as opposed to the revolution, usually quite rapid, that is characteristic of radical innovation.
Most innovations are incremental in nature. However, every so often, a spontaneous, unpredictable "spark of genius" combines with a little bit of luck to produce a radical innovation. Clayton Christensen (who wrote a great book several years ago called The Innovator's Dilemma) studied the disk-drive industry and found that technological change often occurs through incremental innovation punctuated occasionally by a more discontinuous, radical type of innovation (the so-called S-curve of innovation). There are certain cultural elements in an organization that tend to favor one type of innovation over the other. As such, organizations often invest heavily in order to design the "right kind" of climate that is necessary to remove the obstacles to creativity and discovery.
If you just take a look at Dick Fosbury's story, you would think that the "Fosbury Flop" came about due to radical innovation. You would be wrong. A deeper dive into Fosbury's story is instructive (special thanks to Jacob Goldenberg, Oded Lowengart, Shaul Oreg, and Michael Bar-Eli who published a wonderful case study).
Fosbury grew up in Oregon and started high jumping during high school. The dominant method for high jumpers at the time was known as the "straddle method" (see a video of an athlete using this method here). With this method, the jumper crosses the high jump bar face down with his or her legs straddling it. Fosbury learned the "straddle method" at the age of eleven, though he preferred another method (and was actually better at it) known as the "scissors technique" (see a video of an athlete using this method here). His high school track coach made him switch to the "straddle method" at which point Fosbury started to struggle (he was the first to be eliminated in one competition). He asked his coach if he could switch back to the "scissors technique" again, and his coach let him continue to practice it.
Fosbury was a lot more comfortable with his old "scissors technique," and his high jumping started to improve significantly (to the point where he was starting to compete for points for his team). He began to experiment with different variations of the technique, adjusting his body position so that he could shift his center of gravity and clear higher jumps. At one point, his coach pulled him aside to review and study films of his high-jumping performance. No distinct style or technique had as yet been created, though he was starting to develop more of a hybrid technique that didn't fit with any of the commonly used techniques at the time. Fosbury later recalled, "I knew I had to change my body position and that's what started first the revolution, and over the next two years, the evolution."
He continued to slowly change and refine his technique, and his performance continued to improve. At some point in the 1964-1965, he started clearing the high jump bar with his back to it, arching his hips over, then straightening back to kick his heels over the bar. Using this newer technique, he would land on his back in the high jump pit. Luckily, by the time he was finishing up high school, the wood chips in the high jump pit were replaced with bundles of soft foam held together by a net. Fosbury broke his school record during his junior year and placed second in the state the following year, jumping over a 6 feet 5.5 inch bar.
Fosbury enrolled at Oregon State University following high school graduation in 1965. His college coach wasn't as convinced that he would be successful with his unconventional technique until he broke the school record as a sophomore, clearing 6 feet 10 inches. He placed first in the 1968 NCAA championships and qualified for the 1968 Olympics, placing first at the U.S. Olympic Trials with a jump of 7 feet 1 inch.
At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Fosbury used his unconventional technique, which had now been labeled "The Flop" and won the gold medal with a new Olympic record (and American record) of 7 feet 4 1/4 inches. By the 1972 Olympics in Munich, 28 of the 40 competitors were using Fosbury's technique, though the gold medalist used the straddle technique. Within 10 years, almost all high jumpers were using the technique that now is named after Fosbury, which is still the most popular technique used today.
The case of the "Fosbury Flop" clearly shows that not all innovations arise through revolutions, but rather some occur through incremental innovation, evolving slowly over time. As Goldenberg, Lowengart, Oreg, and Bar-Eli discuss, there are other examples of major innovations that occurred in a similar manner to the "Fosbury Flop", including the emergence of rollerblades (note that in-line skates were developed BEFORE roller skates but only became popular much later), the Macintosh computer, and the invention of aspirin.
As Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation describes "a process by which a product, service, or technology initially takes root in simple applications at the bottom of a market—typically by being less expensive and more accessible—and then relentlessly moves upmarket, eventually displacing established competitors." The case of the "Fosbury Flop" builds upon Christensen's theory and strongly suggests that organizations should not take incremental innovations lightly (particularly when they are a competitor's incremental innovation). Today's incremental innovation may become tomorrow's revolution.
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