The future of sports: cutting edge & data-driven
Flyknit, Ultraboost, Air Max - no, these aren’t race car models, but the latest footwear lines of rival sports goods giants Nike and Adidas. While the two global brands have been edging each other out for years on design and style, their products are sending the message that the name of the game now isn’t just on aesthetics but in technology.
This infusion of technology in sports goods isn’t limited to footwear either: the whole sporting industry is increasingly being defined by their level of innovation, now more than ever. This means it’s just not the goods and equipment evolving but even the distribution and accessing of sports is undergoing innovation too.
At the heart of these changes is intellectual property and innovation.
Fabric / Materials Innovation
Sports clothing technology is all about performance enhancement. That’s why major sportswear brands are touting features such as ‘compression technology’ and ‘thermal technology’/ heat technology products.
Improvement in sports clothing isn’t new; but the emphasis on technology-heavy sports goods that actually lead to better performance in sports is driving more and more investments in R&D.
Take the case of Nike and Adidas’ drive: both are investing heavily in innovation labs for performance enhancement.
In these innovation labs, marketing, industrial design, and the hard sciences are all coming together to improve the make and material of a shoe - both for athletes and the general consumer.
Adidas’ famed Ultra Boost line of shoes is a prime example of this marriage between design, branding, and science. The science behind it particularly, boosted its popularity beyond athletes’ circles.
The technology (now being sought patent protection for) behind the world-famous ‘Boost’ material is a product of scientific ingenuity by global chemicals firm BASF.
The Boost technology is actually an application of BASF’s ‘expanded thermoplastic polyurethane’. This material is marketed by BASF under the name Infinergy™ and supplied to Adidas through exclusive patent cooperation deal with Adidas.
Wearable Technology & Data-Driven systems
Apart from fashion and footwear, technology is impacting how sports is being played through a whole range of devices and gadgets that track, measure, and analyse athletes’ performance.
Since sports is basically a numbers game, more and more devices are coming out to improve data collection and data analytics: Catapult is one such company producing GPS-powered wearable gadgets.
The device quantifies athlete’s performance in training and in games, giving the team management valuable insights on players’ performance improvement and informing decisions on team line-up.
This technology trend is fast gaining traction: major sports organizations are adopting data-driven technology standards in how the sport is to be played. Major League Baseball introduced StatCast, the tracking technology that enables collection and analysis of a massive amount of baseball data - significantly player movements - in all of its stadiums in 2015.
Other tracking devices similar to StatCast, under different brands but with the same analytics-driven function, have been applied to other sports such as basketball and football.
Sports Streaming
Entertainment content isn’t the only area disrupted by technology. The landscape of sports broadcasting has been thoroughly changed by over-the-top (OTT) broadcasts, or content streaming over the internet.
OTT has often been associated with video-on-demand services like Netflix or Hulu that offer access on a subscription basis to movies and shows; this has been gaining ground in sports as well with Hulu and Amazon buying rights to livestream the Super Bowl and Thursday Night Football in the US.
These moves by OTT platforms has been putting traditional sports broadcasters on edge, as viewers are increasingly dropping tv subscriptions for these over-the-internet content streams.