The opportunity for disruptive innovation in sports has a couple different classes.
Technology innovation that affects teams, players and the games are actually pretty limited in scope and impact, given the relatively small number of professional leagues and elite athletes that stand to benefit. And technologies that impact media audiences for sports get to have broader impact since the number of sports watchers is huge, global and in most cases, growing.
The home run opportunity is for technologies that can sell to broad consumer markets as well as elite athletes. These products can piggy back on the enormous sports media audience and become large fast. Coming on strong though are service businesses that can make either rapidly scale to meet needs for leagues and media, or as some companies do, meet the needs of athletes directly and bypass the leagues and media.
Football helmets are an example of the relatively small business of supplying specialty equipment. The NFL can make billions annually but a helmet manufacturer will be maybe make a few million. The opportunity is not very big.
SportVision has a bigger business with technology that improves the sports television viewing experience–yellow first down lines and such. The business model has served the company well in bringing tracking technology to baseball and hockey. Television, which is mostly local for MLB and NHL, provides an incentive for engineers and data analysts to innovate and foster fan engagement.
The last case has made Under Armour a major brand in just a few years, using modest technical advances to create enough differentiation that the company is now a peer of Nike and Adidas. Media is a force multiplier for anything that the company wants to try.
Now there is another business model for sports technology, services. At the Sloan Sports conference companies like SAP and Booz Allen had large footprints, showing new technology for data management and analysis, but selling services to leagues and teams as potential customers. Those heavy-hitters were neighbors for a dozen or so startups at Sloan conference.
Most of the startups will have a future as next-generation helmets and maybe one or two can break through to be a SportVision. None seem to have the scale or talent of a SAP or a Booz Allen. But it is hard to tell if many people in sports grasp the scope of what technology enables. Education is not valued highly. A Bachelor’s degree from a good school or a challenging degree program has value for athletes that is out of proportion compared to the advanced degrees that non-athletes hold.
There are startups out there that will succeed as large-scale services. The athlete performance technology startups like Sparta, P3 and Exos did not have a presence at Sloan. These companies have value-add for athletes that take them out of the leagues and media box. These are also companies that are progressing in step with the advances that sports science is making as an interdisciplinary academic research field.
Computing research, whether university- or corporate-centered, was another innovation source that was mostly invisible at the Sloan conference. Leslie Saxon was on the sports science panel and got to talk about work in her group at University of Southern California, the Center for Body Computing. Priya Narasimhan of Carnegie Mellon talked about her stadium/arena app development startup, YinzCam.
Service business models give companies a chance to evolve their interfaces for customers and technologies advance, which they are sure to do as the science and technology research community investigates sports health and performance. Service companies that stay in sync with the research have the best chance to be the giants of this industry.
The Best Things I Read Last Week
- The Mechanics of Recovery: Knowing When to Recharge elitefts … Dr. Bryan Mann addresses the culture of overtraining in sports. He doesn’t come out and call coaches lazy for not knowing more about young athletes, but he does think it can be better and he puts forward a path in that direction.
- Mary Cain Is Growing Up Fast The New York Times Magazine … What is it like to be a running prodigy and to train under Alberto Salazar? This article tells all.
- NCAA summit draws soccer community to discuss health, safety NCAA Media Center … I thought that this year’s Sloan Conference might be a pivotal moment for Applied Sports Science in the US. Now I think that meetings like the recent one between US Soccer and the NCAA, the big multi-facted athlete health and performance discussions are actually where the most progress will be made.
- Sustaining an Analytics Advantage MIT Sloan Management Review … There is a skill to using analytics well for organizations that want to gain a competitive advantage with them.
- Skeletal Muscle Signature of a Champion Sprint Runner Journal of Applied Physiology … Insights into the physiology of one of the fastest men who ever lived. His muscle makeup is as unique as his speed.