Innovation
Notes on innovation.
How Do Revolutions Emerge? Lessons from the Fosbury Flop:
Only in the 1700s did an amateur ice skater come up with the idea to replace the blade on the ice skates with a set of lined-up wheels. The Dutch, the British, and the Scotts, who established a skating club in 1742, quickly adopted the new invention...
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Two twenty-year-old brothers named Scott and Brennan Olson found an old pair of in-line skates as they were cleaning the shed of the toy store in which they had been working. The antiquated design captured their imagination, and they started to develop a new brand of skates, based on the in-line design. To their advantage were the new materials and new technologies that al lowed for the design of lighter skates that offered the skater higher speeds than those made possible with roller skates. They called their new invention "Rollerblades" because of the blade-like shape of the set of wheels. Interestingly, they knew noth ing of the name "in-line skates." After a somewhat rough beginning, together with a businessman by the name of Naegele Jr., they began to manufacture and market the product, and by 1992, rollerblades had become a $22.5 million industry.
