What Can Sports Teach Tech About Innovation?

As a red-blooded Englishman during an Olympics, I broadly enjoy two things : sports and the subsequent hauling up of a Union Jack over French soil.

But you know what I don’t like about sports? 

I don’t like how no one ever takes sporting events and tries to apply them to completely unrelated fields. Where were the posts about Gareth Southgate on LinkedIn?! Why do people (salespeople especially) never quote athletes when talking about hawking (tuah) B2B SaaS?! 

I’m kidding, of course. People have been trying to create ‘lessons’ from sporting achievement since Grug the caveman successfully managed to throw a rock into a bird's nest killing the two inhabitants and Ug immediately compared it to running an agile software methodology.

But none of these people have been me, so here’s my whack at taking lessons from our favourite sports-doers and tellers-of-what-to-doers-of-sports-doers and applying them to how to run a tech business.

Innovation takes time

In 1979, the NBA did something relatively unthinkable (I say relatively because it’s not like they added trampolines or flooded the stadiums like the Colosseum).

They added the now ubiquitous three point line.

This meant that a made shot when the player’s feet were set behind the new line was worth three points, one more than when the player’s feet were set within the line.

So what happened after this mathematical revolution shook the foundation of the sport? Were there riots? Did dogs start marrying cats? Did players start using miniature cannons to shoot from 400 yards in a misunderstanding about distance === more points?

Well, not much actually.

Teams took less than 3 attempts per game from behind this new magic line in the year of its inception. 

But now? They huck (tuah) up almost 30 of the suckers a game.

This is only weird when you consider that, unlike hairstyles and views on cocaine’s impact on athleticism, the mathematical properties of 3 > 2 haven’t changed since the 80s. 

What changed was two things. A) Peoples’ attitude towards the three point shot in the 80s was that it was gimmicky and weird and European and they hated it and B) they hadn’t grown up shooting three pointers.

Basketball 3 pointers, much like a lot of tech innovations like iPhones and eCommerce, had an awareness and adoption issue. But the core idea was so solid that all it took was time and a steady adoption increase for the dominos to really start falling.

If your core concept is infallible (3 > 2), then you have to do everything you can to stay in the race until people start waking up to reality.

Don’t forget about entertainment

In 2015, the MLB World Series had 23.5 million viewers. 

Just 14 years prior, In 2001, it was 39.1 million.

So what happened? Why did 14.6 million people stop watching the biggest event in the baseball calendar?

Like someone about to fail an eye test, let’s look at the numbers. 

In the year 2000, baseball teams averaged 190 home runs, whereas by 2015 that number was steadily declining to 140 home runs. As much as seeing someone play solid defensive baseball is fun, seeing a superhuman use a bat to send a little ball into geostationary orbit is waaaaay more fun.

So the product was less fun, but how did this happen?

Let’s look at the players.

This was the average baseball player in 2015, looking like he’s losing a bareknuckle fight to the concept of sliding.

And this is the legendary Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, who both look like they could knock out an oxen in hand-to-hoof combat.

You can probably get where I am going with this.

Look, steroids are a serious problem and come with a tonne of negative side effects, and I would never promote their use.

But if you want to use a bat to smash a ball travelling at 100mph and have millions of people watch you do it, they certainly give you, and the league you are a part of, a massive advantage.

How does this relate to tech? It doesn’t really, it’s just that whoever views that picture of Barry Bonds has to get other people to view it, like the Grudge, or Barry will show up and throw you through the sun.

Now that you’ve seen the pic and taken up the curse, leaving me scott free, I suppose I have the time to explain the learning of the steroid era of baseball to tech companies.

Entertainment matters. Purity and sanctity are mostly moral constructs in the world of sports. Why are you not allowed to take drugs but you can put sticky stuff on your hands that can help you catch a cold in Aruba? 

Sometimes, just sometimes, when it’s not going to harm people, the same can be said about tech. You have to make sure your product and marketing are entertaining, even if it means bending convention slightly. Or just take a tonne of horse testosterone and start flinging a bat around, rules are meaningless.

Don’t tie your product to a single distribution method

Back to the NBA after a brief sojourn to the pharma-wonderland of early 2000s baseball, but basketball has a different kind of problem. 

Since 2011, ratings for NBA TV broadcasts have declined by a stunning 45%.

Unfortunately, this is a common trend, as traditional TV struggles against streaming services, and in the case of basketball, where games can be over two hours of coverage with a handful of highlight plays, social media clips showing the highlights of games.

This lands the NBA in an extremely awkward position. 

It’s possible that when combining total viewership over TV, social media and streaming, viewership is stable. However, there’s no way to attribute that, and even worse, the NBA makes the lion’s share of its revenue from its lucrative licensing deals to TV networks. But if people start rejecting the product, will networks stop paying so much?

It’s a real issue, and some are calling for the NBA to try and monetise social media viewership more effectively, which brings me onto my point about tech.

NBA are at risk of their product (basketball games) being tied too closely to a single distribution method (television). You see this all the time with tech startups. They tie their product (SaaS) to a distribution method (social media, organic search, paid advertising), which is outside their domain of control. 

As a tech CEO, you can’t control algorithm changes on platforms like LinkedIn and Google, and if over 80% of your revenue comes from one of these channels, you could see huge impacts from seemingly innocuous updates. Just look at some of the changes below from a small Google update in 2023, and ask yourself, could you survive that drop?

People will call you insane

I am a man who is called insane more times on a weekly basis than the national average. This entire paragraph is an attempt to position this as meaning I am a savant genius rather than the man yelling about sliced bagels in the B&Q car park.

And to do that I’m going to start talking about men in swimming trunks trying to make each other forget phone numbers, or as it’s also known, the UFC or Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Today, the UFC is worth an estimated $12.3 billion, which to put into perspective, is more than even the most successful NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, who are literally known as America’s NFL Team.

But it wasn’t always this way. If 20 years ago you’d told people that two men trying to fold each other like laundry would be one of the biggest sports in the world, they’d have lumped you in with me as a bagel and men-folding-each-other-like-laundry obsessed weirdo. In fact, presidential hopeful John McCain called cagefighting ‘human cockfighting’ in 1996 but there’s a good chance he googled the wrong thing.

People will look at you as crazy, and even disparage you, if you’re the first through the wall, but much like the NBA 3 pointer and the sport of dribbling heads off of canvases, if you stick it out, you’ll win them round as fans.

I honestly should stop the blog here, but I can’t not make the point that sometimes you may be in a situation like the UFC situation, but without even the power of cool that a martial arts deathmatch has. 

A perfect example of this is a basketball player called Rick Barry. Rick Barry was a unique player because he shot his free throw ‘granny style’ meaning he made a delicious apple crumble before shooting. No, not that, he shot them underhand, like a dork, and was widely mocked. 

But you know what shouldn’t be mocked? The fact that when Rick Barry retired, he had made an astounding 90% of his free throws using his very uncool technique, the highest percentage of any player in the NBA at that time. Sometimes, doing whatever it takes to get the job done, regardless of cool factors, is the most important thing a startup can do.

“But Matt, you just told me through that expertly crafted Barry Bonds paragraph I should look to be cool and exciting, and now you’re confusingly throwing in Rick Barry and telling me to be uncool”.

To that, I say “horses for courses”.

Oh, you want more than that?

Basically, your job as a decision maker is to know when to hold 'em and when to fold' em, and focus on customer experience. Considering a new marketing campaign or product feature that may be a bit risque? Go the Bonds route and swing for the fences. 

Considering whether to use jQuery or a brand new shiny JS library that will take longer to develop? Channel Rick Barry and throw it underhand to get the feature out of the door quickly and effectively.

What’s your favourite learning from sports that can be applied to tech? Did I make you angry by calling Rick Barry a weird European dork despite the fact he’s from New Jersey and objectively cool by nature of being an 8 time NBA All Star? Leave me a comment below 👇