When former NFL linebacker and Harvard Business School graduate Isaiah Kacyvenski noticed the sports business and technology landscape over the past year, he realized companies were making highly-impactful decisions that weren’t well-informed decisions. In any other industry, that wouldn’t have been acceptable, so why was it necessarily happening in sports? How could he and potentially a broader team bring some understanding to the process?
Kacyvenski, along with four-time U.S. women’s ice hockey Olympic medalist Angela Ruggiero and ex-Forrester executive and entrepreneur Josh Walker, joined forces to create the Sports Innovation Lab, a digital platform that organizes the sports technology and fitness market and helps executives make better-informed decisions about how technology can play a role in their business.
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“The best idea was to create a market research and consulting company that really provided clarity for a bunch of buyers and sellers in sports technology,” said Kacyvenski, who has invested in more than a dozen startups and added that with the “highly fragmented market,” no one had done a comprehensive overview of it to date.
“There’s a different value proposition for each of them but very relevant areas for us to focus on. It’s about starting with that foundation of mapping the space and driving through to adding more value from objective report cards of the products to how we see some of these trends playing out in the future.”
Added Walker: “We’re really taking our company after Gartner, which is a company that can provide products and services to an industry to help them make better technology decisions. To date, no one has done that in sports…We’re called a lab because we’re going to actually test the products and services in these markets. We’re going to spend a day with these companies, a half day with their marketing team and a half day with their engineering team. We’re going to see what their products can do and can’t do. That’s going to give us a much better way of advising the larger set of customers out there and where they should be focused.”
The Boston-based Sports Innovation Lab, which will also give its clients access to an advisory firm, will consist of 1,000-plus company profiles across 30 categories, all of which will fit into four major topic areas: smart venues, immersive media, quantified athlete and next generation sponsorship. Through a licensed subscription of the market research platform, sports leagues, teams, agencies, investors and other companies will have an opportunity to better understand how each company fits into the intersection of sports, technology and fitness.
“The conversation is happening now, and everyone understands the power of technology for revenue optimization, player performance, fan activation, sponsorships and making their venues more compatible to use these technologies,” said Ruggiero, who is also the Chief Strategy Officer for LA 2024 — the committee looking to bring the 2024 Olympics to Los Angeles. “We see the opportunity is now to make sense of it all.”
She highlighted teams and leagues especially as organizations that could “help move the needle in the industry” as they continue to make smarter technology decisions focused around fan engagement and athlete performance.
At its launch, the Sports Innovation Lab — which is also a founding partner of the NFL Players Association’s athlete-driven accelerator — has 11 founding partners of its own that received early access to the platform, including Octagon, IBM, Gatorade, Booz Allen Hamilton, Go4It, STACK Media, Portico Capital, Harvard Innovation Labs, MIT Sports Tech Research Group, the USC Center for Body Computing, and the NFLPA.