How The Sports Industry Pioneered Advances In The Innovation Economy

By Robert Safian

This is the fourth essay in our series of 10 Lessons From 10 Years Of The World’s Most Innovative Companies.

The National Football League is an amazingly successful enterprise, but these days it’s hard to think of it as a bastion of forward-thinking business practices. The organization’s blindness, or willful denial, of concussion risks could be a case study in mismanagement. Whether the edifice of professional football will eventually crumble under the weight of health challenges has become a reasonable debate. But here’s what’s not debatable: Football has been a popularizer of several key innovation-economy breakthroughs.

Consider the now ubiquitous “yellow line” denoting first-down markers on football TV broadcasts. This was the first mass-market implementation of augmented-reality technology, which places digitized visual information into real-world situations. Pioneered by a Chicago-based company called Sportvision (one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company honorees in 2010), the yellow line is now just one example of in-game AR, from specific down-and-distance information in NFL games to digitally inserted advertisements on fields and backgrounds. Sports-related AR has spread well beyond football: Sportvision also provides the Pitchf/x technology that allows Major League Baseball games to track pitches and show strike zone information, as well as Racef/x that allows Nascar viewers to more easily follow specific vehicles.

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