At Decathlon, innovation is at the heart of our project.

This strategy has 2 main objectives:

1) “Innovate smart” because, first and foremost, we want to make sport easier for people who use our products. We place the user at the heart of our approach and we focus on usage innovations. Listening to, and observing sports people in action, in our Research & Development centre, in our laboratories, is how our sales assistants, product managers, designers or engineers imagine the product of the future – the product that is more practical, comfortable, enjoyable and safe for the user.
The 2seconds tent is a perfect example. Quechua’s design teams revolutionised mountain sports forever by fulfilling the dream of every hiker with a fast, simple, intuitive, instantaneous pitching system. And this saga is still running after several years.

2) We also want to innovate for the benefit of everyone, in all product categories, not only at the most expensive or sophisticated end. Our aim, therefore, is that our innovations are accessible to a maximum number of customers and users worldwide because their prices are as low as possible.
We share all this expertise during the Innovation Awards by Decathlon. Every year, this event is a unique opportunity for employees to experience the spirit of innovation that drives us all, to discover amazingly smart products that will soon be available in Decathlon stores and online.

Innovation Awards 2015 - Winners

                                                                           APTONIA                                                         QUECHUA                                                          NABAJI                                  
                                                                          DOUBLE USE                                                 FRESH&BLACK                                                      SELFIT

Research and Development

Decathlon states an intention to propose and make accessible high-performance, innovative products designed for the well-being of sports people. The Decathlon research centre, the Industrial Division, the brands and the Design department work daily to provide the best solutions for sports people of all abilities. Decathlon keeps this promise on a daily basis by controlling every stage of the product creation process: listening to customers, analysing the human body in motion and seeking out the best components.

From the day our first researcher was hired in 1990 until today, the significant increase in investment in R&D clearly illustrates its importance to Decathlon. Upstream, Decathlon SportsLab carries out research programmes into the needs of sports people.

Downstream, it also checks the technical balance between the brands’ offer and the expectations of users. Decathlon SportsLab deploys considerable resources in order to properly carry out the 5 steps essential to any scientific approach (observe, understand, imagine, experiment and check):

- more than 50 researchers
- a worldwide network of scientific laboratories, research organisations, universities and industrial partners.

On average, this organisation enables our teams to register 40 patents per year.