One afternoon in Innsbruck, a skater lifts an Ikea shopping bag high above his head, catches gust of the Furn, and sails down the street at an astonishing speed. An audience of two watches this performance with equal bemusement and awe. Eventually he looses control of his makeshift apparatus, the bag flaps in the dying wind and the rider bails whilst the skateboard keeps rolling.

This absurd combination of elements is not just an act of spontaneous ingenuity, rather it is the product of innovation diffusion. The Swedish Ikea bag is being used as a sail, in combination with a Californian skateboard, that was derived from a Hawaiian surfboard and is performed as a new sport, to a small audience, in a two time Winter Olympic City. Each of these foreign elements has its own background of innovations that have migrated to this one moment in time and space.