[June 27, 2017]

Sports Innovation Lab Launches Scout™: A Revolutionary Sports Technology Product Evaluation Tool

The Sports Innovation Lab today launches Scout™: an online evaluation tool to help sports industry clients identify the technology solutions they need to innovate their organizations and achieve their goals.

This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170627006239/en/

Enterprise Scout Chart (Graphic: Business Wire)

Scout™ is a proprietary technology evaluation tool for the sports industry. It analyzes products across the sports technology market based on detailed lab evaluations, and identifies market leaders according to sports organizations' specific requirements. Scout™ then places its bespoke insights into the complex sports technology market at customers' fingertips through the Sports Innovation Lab's online platform.

This customizable tool is the first of its kind and will revolutionize the way the emerging market of sports technology and innovation is defined. Crucially, Scout™ will equip sports industry clients to make the best choices when selecting new technology products and vendors.

Utilizing Scout™, the Sports Innovation Lab has created new rankings for the Athlete Performance Platform market - technologies that provide data on athletes, which can then be used for anything from creating personalized training programs to delivering a more engaging sports event viewing experience. The Scout™ rankings identify the leading technology vendors as "Game Changers," which are the highest ranked companies in this space, based on peer-reviewed, industry-sourced criteria.

For the Athlete Performance Platform Scout™ rankings, the Sports Innovation Lab created four "buyer personas": Enterprise Buyers, Sports Scientists, Strength and Conditioning Coaches, and Evangelists. These personas represent different types of sports industry client, with product assessment criteria corresponding to their specific needs. After evaluating technology vendors against these four buyer personas, the Sports Innovation Lab is proud to recognize the following companies as "Game Changers":

1) Enterpris Buyers: EDGE10, Kinduct Technologies, Smartabase

The highly-anticipated launch of Scout™ just six months after the establishment of the Sports Innovation Lab is a testament to the hard work of the team, led by partners Josh Walker, Isaiah Kacyvenski, and Angela Ruggiero.

"It is an exciting time for the sports industry because technology is fundamentally changing the future of sport at a very fast pace," said Walker, Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Sports Innovation Lab. "Since our launch, we've been helping our sports industry clients make better technology decisions. They've told us they want a formal framework for evaluating and selecting technology. With the launch of Scout™, we now have that tool."

"We are launching Scout™ with the Athlete Performance Platform market because we feel it's the most compelling area of sports technology innovation today, with its wide-ranging implications beyond elite sports including healthcare, corporate wellness, military, and youth sports," said Kacyvenski, Co-Founder and Managing Director of The Sports Innovation Lab. "The Game Changers we've named in our Scout™ on the Athlete Performance Platform market have clearly demonstrated the ability to consolidate and analyze multiple sources of athlete data and provide a long-term vision of how this technology impacts everyone."

Until the release of the Scout™, the sports industry had to rely on anecdotal and incomplete information to make technology decisions. As technology truly transforms the industry and throws business models into flux, this is no longer acceptable. Scout's online platform has been developed in partnership with a panel of experts including advisors, academics, and customers. The data is peer reviewed by the vendors themselves. For this specific project the Sports Innovation Lab interviewed more than 100 experts and decision-makers across the industry.

"The launch of our Scout™ product is an important milestone for the company," said Ruggiero, Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Sports Innovation Lab. "Looking ahead, we are also focused on the larger vision for the Sports Innovation Lab. Our vision is to become the global hub for understanding sports technology and innovation- period."

About The Sports Innovation Lab

The Sports Innovation Lab is the first research and advisory firm dedicated to the sports technology industry. The company launched in January 2017 with its flagship digital research platform, giving client members access to more than 2,000 sports and fitness technology vendor profiles, organized into sectors that describe in depth each company's capabilities within the markets they serve.

In addition, the Sports Innovation Lab boasts an advisory panel of more than fifty world-class global advisors and innovators, whose market analysis and predictions will be available to clients on the research platform. A small sample of the current advisors who inform the Sports Innovation Lab's coverage of Quantified Athlete technology include: Mark Gorski of Sports Data Labs, Mark Verstegen of EXOS, Dr. Leslie Saxon of USC Center for Body Computing, Doug Casa of the Korey Stringer Institute, and Mounir Zok of the US Olympic Committee. For a more complete list of Sports Innovation Lab advisors, please visit www.sportsilab.com.

The Sports Innovation Lab founders come from three very different backgrounds. Josh Walker is a proven venture-backed entrepreneur and former VP of Research from Forrester (News - Alert), one of the world's leading research and advisory firms. Angela Ruggiero, a four-time Olympic medalist, has spent over a decade in sports administration and is currently a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board, Chair of IOC Athletes' Commission, and Chief Strategy Officer for the LA 2024 Olympic bid. Isaiah Kacyvenski is a former NFL player, active investor and advisor, proven entrepreneur, and an expert in the sports technology space.

Select company partners now include Booz Allen Hamilton, Gatorade, Google, Go4it, Harvard Innovation Lab, IBM, Intel, MIT Sports Technology Research Group, NBA, NFLPA, Octagon (News - Alert), OneTeam Collective, Portico Capital, USC Center for Body Computing, and Verizon.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170627006239/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]