Executive Summary Sportstech innovation in football – academic literature review
football clubs and the maturity of technology. Some clubs might be capable of taking the risk to invest in technology at an early development stage, but more insight is needed to pursue potential collaboration partners and support further innovation in Sportstech. One avenue could be to draw on theory and methods from the design research tradition, such as the Design Thinking approach and the PACT framework utilized in this report.
Sportstech innovation is an evolving research area, with sports innovation and football innovation and entrepreneurship being identifiable as key areas. Our literature survey shows a limited number of 25 publications within football Sportstech innovation and entrepreneurship at elite and professional level, indicating that football innovation as a separate research area is in its infancy.
To support further innovation, academia should engage in research in practice, extending the current focus on research being conducted in the initial design phases and experimental settings to also include implementation, adoption, and impact studies in practice.
The results show that research primarily focuses on the contexts of player performance, including team performance analysis, performance tracking, training, and injury prevention/rehabilitation. This is done through tracking technologies, automated data analysis and processing, video analysis, skill practice assisting technology and treatment technologies. Football analysts are the main consumer of the technologies identified, but coaches and physiotherapists are also represented.
Sportstech innovation in the industry from a typology and startup perspective – The FootballTech Multiform Matrix
The results indicate that research is focused on developing new technologies, and to a lesser degree, on further development, implementation, adoption, and impact. Furthermore, there appears to be a gap between academia and practice which needs to be addressed in further innovation. Even though we evaluated how our identified articles in the review were disseminated to the football practitioners, it is our strong belief that further work is needed to support stronger academia-industry collaboration through the development of common language and knowledge-sharing platforms.
The sports industry is a very broad area which cuts across many other industry sectors. Innovation in the sports industry is nowadays primarily driven by startups that harness the latest technologies to propose novel solutions targeted at Athletes, Fans and Executives as end-users. A review of existing Sportstech innovation typologies revealed 4 main categories of innovation areas: Performance, Training & Health solutions aimed at Athletes, Social & Fan engagement solutions aimed at Fans, Facilities & Events solutions and Media & Sponsorship solutions aimed at Executives of organizations involved in sports.
Further work is therefore needed to explore the balance between the needs and challenges in the
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