Sports Innovation Lab co-Founder & CEO Angela Ruggiero urges those across the sports business to consider whether now actually might be the right time to invest, saying, “It’s about the right investments, and we think people and technology driving that fan experience are the right way." On the latest episode of "SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead," Ruggiero joined our Andrew Levin to break down the recently released Top 25 Most Innovative Teams In The World list.
On the purpose and benefits of the Top-25 study, which took four years to complete:
Ruggiero: We’ve been obsessed with helping the industry be better versions of themselves. As an athlete, I expected that of myself. It’s what allowed me to compete in four Olympics. So now, working on the business side of sports and being a market-research and strategy company, really our job is to help the industry understand how to get better … and the vision from Day One has been that we should think about acting like athletes and really trying to unearth performance.
On how COVID-19 impacted the results of the list:
Ruggiero: We’ve been talking about innovation for four years … and COVID has allowed the industry to take a step back. It’s forced the industry to take a step back and say, “How do we do things differently? How do we truly innovate to stay relevant in the attention economy during a time when we’re all bleeding capital?” COVID is the accelerator but, more than anything, it exposed the cracks that were in the foundation already, that we were over reliant on certain revenue streams.
On the most-significant innovation to emerge out of the pandemic:
Ruggiero: We saw a lot of change on the media side, and we’ve been talking about this for years … the idea of convergent media. Again, if you didn’t have live games, if you weren’t on linear, a lot of fluid fans are using their mobile devices, are creating content, streaming content, doing more outside of just having a game on TV. We saw a lot of innovation there, both from an organizational standpoint but then a content-creation and delivery standpoint.
