Mankind is very clever and continuous improvement is being made in all aspects of life: arts, sciences, technology, sports, entertainment you name it. Many of the important innovations were originally patented and some were not. Some have revolutionized the world and others benefit a more limited market.

MIT University maintains a list of important innovations that can be found here:
http://web.mit.edu/invent/invent-main.html

You can search their archives and test your “Innovation IQ”

One of the best is M&M’s candy. Think of it: a sweet sugar coating over delicious chocolate. Solves a major problem with chocolate: it tends to clump and melt. The product was patented in 1941 just in time for GI’s to put into their C-rations. Sales were an immediate success and the Mars family expanded and is now one of the largest candy companies in the world. Sugar and chocolate have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years until Mars had this inspiration.

Sporting contests have evolved over time as one improvement after another was invented by a participant. Columbus brought soccer (football) back from the West Indies where he saw the natives playing with a gutta percha (natural rubber) ball. After Charles Goodyear invented vulcanization of rubber, you could make an inflatable ball which can be kicked great distances. At Rugby School in England, a player “picked up the ball and ran with in complete disregard of the rules”. This game became of course, rugby. In the early 20th Century US rugby players started throwing the ball forward, again in complete violation of the old rules but creating a new game we know as football. For some reason the technique adopted to place kick was one where the kicker kicked “straight on” with the leg kick square to the shoulders. Over the years the shape of the football was narrowed and made more pointy than a rugby ball so that it could be ‘spiraled’ by quarterback great distances with extreme accuracy. The place kicker on the other hand had a more difficult object to deal with due to the reduced size and shape. It wasn’t until 1964 that the Buffalo Bills hired Pete Gogalak, a European soccer player, as their place kicker. In his first game he kicked a 57-yard field goal that would have been a record except it was in an exhibition. Within a few years every NFL team had a soccer style kicker and has since been adopted on college and high school levels.
The question is why it took so long for football to adopt a proven technique that is clearly superior to the “old method”?

http://www.buffalobills.com/news/AlumniSpotlightPeteGogolak.jsp

In competitive high jumping the standard techniques from the (19th century) was the “crawl” which fairly clearly describes the motion used in jumping the bar. A University of Oregon high jumper, Dick Fosbury, was mediocre at best until he developed a technique requiring the jumper to go over head first, arch his back, then kick his trailing legs to clear the bar. He won the Gold Medal in Mexico City with a jump of 7’ 5 ¾” in 1968. This technique was fairly quickly adopted by leading competitive jumpers’ world wide and is now the standard practice at all levels.

http://www.fastforward400.com/faster_fosbury.html

So the conclusion is many innovations started as modifications of standard practice but produced a meaningful benefit. The rate of adoption has varied in sporting events depending on if the established players could learn the new technique or were they simply surpassed or replaced with experts in the new techniques.

So what is the Pascal Application technology and does it have potential to revolutionize lotteries, or become the next M&M’s?