In the middle of the 20th century, a single exercise enthusiast who would later become nationally known as Jack LaLane single-handedly revolutionized weightlifting by virtue of an original inspiration that Drucker would likely regard as being attributable to genius and as functions of process needs, industry market changes, and new knowledge. Specifically, Jack LaLane was (probably the first modern) professional fitness trainer in American history. As a young man, he was a fitness enthusiast who, before becoming famous, earned a living teaching others how to build their bodies through resistance training.
At the time, there were very few weightlifting gyms and those that existed were not particularly welcoming to novices or to recreational users; they were dingy, dirty, and frequented more by competitive athletes like boxers and wrestlers than by ordinary people hoping to change the way they looked. Jack LaLane recognized that there was a demand for an accessible gym, so he built his own personal fitness studio where he trained his clients.
He realized that the most effective resistance training could be accomplished if there were some way to change the direction of gravity from straight up and down to adjustable angles. He realized this was particularly important to his clients because novices lacked the coordination and strength to exercise efficiently and safely with hand-held "free" weights that traveled through three-dimensional space.
LaLane's knowledge of the specific needs of his clients led him to create a multiple pulley system to change the direction of resistance so that exercises could be performed at many different angles rather than just in the vertical plane. He also created a plate-loading system that...
Instead of manually adding and removing weighted units to a fixed bar, LaLane created a weight stack with a hole down the center and a locking pin system to enable the selection of any number of plates in the stack through the simple adjustment of the locking pin.
In the terminology of Types and Patterns of Innovation (date), this would be considered a radical, competence-destroying architectural product innovation, because it fundamentally changed how weightlifters used weights; it had the potential to substantially overtake the existing market for free weight equipment (at least in the commercial market); and it created an entirely new system in which incremental weights and the hand-held mechanism of using them related to one another.
Furthermore, according to Types and Patterns of Innovation (date), the introduction of plate-loaded weightlifting machines represented the beginning of a technological trajectory that would inspire decades of subsequent evolution, incremental innovation, and perfection. Within the commercial gym application, LaLane's plate-loaded machines would also be considered a discontinuous technology because it relegated plate-loaded weightlifting equipment to private home use and to hard-core gyms almost exclusively. Unfortunately, as innovative as LaLane was technologically, he was not equally sophisticated in business because he failed to patent his revolutionary design. However, his genius still serves to illustrate the fundamental concepts of human innovation.
References
Drucker, Peter, F. "The Discipline of Innovation." 1985 in The Innovative Enterprise,
Chapter Three: "Types and Patterns of Innovation"
