Lore of The Rings: Conclusion

We hope you’ve enjoyed our three-part analysis of innovation at the Olympics. Now that the Olympics have concluded, we look forward to seeing where the innovations showcased in Pyeongchang will end up — we have a feeling that we will be seeing them in our everyday lives sooner rather than later. We hope our perspective on potential growth opportunities was helpful, and our concepts thought-provoking. From how the athletes prepare, to how we spectate, to how cities invest in themselves, the most recent Olympics proved to be yet another grand stage for Innovation, just like their predecessors. In addition to playing a vital role in a broader cultural and societal context, we believe they are a clear signal for what is next.

During our series, we investigated a broad variety of Olympic innovations through three major lenses — athletes, fans, and cities — to uncover their future potential impact.  Through our efforts we uncovered distinct opportunity spaces and found certain imperatives for acting on them:

Athletes

Opportunity Space:

• Products that measure and analyze personal data in the moment and offer immediate assistance — either informative or preventative.

Imperatives:

• Design an ecosystem around a human focal point, seamlessly marrying sensors, form, and instant responsiveness.
• Speed of insight, not just quality of insight, will unlock the value of connected products, creating new opportunities to differentiate products.
• Every apparel and equipment company is now an education company — it is time to help your buyers achieve better results.

Fans

Opportunity Space:

• Products that provide greater context and engagement to whatever you’re viewing through seamless access to live, relevant information.

Imperatives:

• Treat your fan experience the same as an OTT channel — as a platform designed to be built upon.
• Transform the 80% of game time spent in breaks into branded downtime.
• Fans are becoming more like data scientists — feed them more information to feed their passion.

Cities

Opportunity Space:

• Products that leverage technology to manage the influx of crowds and increase security in unwieldy circumstances.

Imperatives:

• Look to airspace as a scalable and underused frontier for flexible security and development which can reduce overhead costs.
• Develop networks of smart devices, such as drones and beacons, that are capable of being used for both general purposes like congestion management, and high impact niche use cases, such as emergencies.
• Agree on flexible standards for product and service development that allow quick collection and dissemination of relevant data, utilizing past, present, and future infrastructure.

However, not satisfied with just projecting the potential impact across industries, we also had some of our best thinkers brainstorm potential concepts that we think could be viable mass-market products or services in the near term. The outputs were unique concepts related to opportunity spaces present for athletes, fans, and cities.