Today, we are very happy to be taking a dive into the world of high-performance innovation with Finbarr Kirwan, who is Vice President of Summer Sports at the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
1. Maintaining the 1% competitive advantage is your de facto mission, where this translates into medals for US Olympians and Paralympians. How do you approach this?
As the sports industry shifts and changes with the entrance of new stakeholders, we must take advantage of this. As knowledge becomes democratized faster, and artificial intelligence is accelerating the categorization and collection of data, our role must shift to orchestrators of new knowledge, creating links. In my job this means not turning down an opportunity to learn from a different industry, as foreign as they may seem at the outset. The notion of consistent curiosity must be worked into the organization, and by having this mentality, we are able to uncover new techniques, solutions and insights from everywhere. My day to day is about supporting this multi-disciplinary environment across our high-performance directors, as well as an ecosystem of investors, tech companies, startups, research centers, and other innovators in and outside the industry.
2. You mentioned ecosystem. Could you tell us more about how important this is?
Absolutely critical to the work that we do today. At the USOPC, we have over 400 employees, and we work closely with our partners, the national governing bodies (federations), who have helped bring in close to 700 Olympic medals since Sydney 2000. As successful as this is, we noted that there were areas within our programs that could be improved by working with external stakeholders. Being in the United States, we started looking at the hubs of innovation on different topics, from technology, to medicine, health, fitness, and others. We started to engage with these groups and found a great interest from many of them to start working with us on long-term technology & innovation goals. Maintaining this growing ecosystem is a key responsibility I have, which has many benefits from network access, to rapid development and validation of ideas and solutions, to funding. This ecosystem is delivering value to our athletes and coaches first and foremost, but ultimately, it is our intention to have them add value to our brand, our marketing and commercial programs, athlete welfare projects and much more.
3. Can you tell us a bit more about the USOPC’s Technology & Innovation Fund?
The USOPC is a privately funded organization, which is not typical in the Olympic Movement. So, for any new ventures or projects, we are always thinking about the financial sustainability of launching anything. With the increased competition for medals at the Olympic & Paralympic Games, we realized we were behind some of our competitors and needed to invest in the technology side of our programs. With all the connections we had built over time with the technology industry and venture capitalists, we were able to launch a Technology & Innovation Fund, the first in the Olympic Movement. This group was driven by two points of passion: Technology & Team USA. With the generous support of these investors, we have been able to increase the chances of our athletes, coaches and performance directors to access novel ideas and solutions. We set up an advisory board that is made of these individuals, and our role at the USOPC, as stewards of this capital, is to drive these investments towards clear objectives that impact performance.
4. How do you prioritize which sports to focus on when developing new solutions and services?
The first thing we are doing in this regard is to surface the needs and requirements from the sports, and this is a conversation that we facilitate with athletes, coaches, and the respective national governing bodies. The focus is on training and preparation for competitions mainly, and the technologies we have been working on include artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, training enhancement centered around health monitoring and others. However, to take one of the technologies down to the sport level we must find the right balance of testing out new products and services with the phase of preparation that the athlete and coach are going through. At any given time, we are distributing funds from the Technology & Innovation Fund to over 30 projects, which we monitor and manage simultaneously. Importantly, we have set up institutional and reporting mechanisms to ensure that this is a transparent process, that is well communicated to each of the stakeholders involved and has a clear objective to achieve.
5. Can you tell us how athletes play a role in technology validation and the deployment of different solutions?
Athletes are the marketplace for these solutions. If they don’t see immediate utility, or improvement over time, then the solution will not gain the support of coaches or the USOPC at large. An excellent example of immediate utility and impact is our project using radar technology for shot put throwing. The solution allowed for immediate feedback in the training context which gave never-before-accessible data points to athletes and their coaches on the field of play using video and 4 key data points. The solution is now being used across throwing sports, which shows that athletes value this. We are seeing many technology providers in the market, and our role is to help make decisions for whether a solution will be useful for the athlete. This process is accelerated because we have athletes and coaches who are data-savvy, tech-friendly, and who trust our ability to put solutions in their hands that will impact their performance.
6. For National Olympic Committees looking to embark on a similar journey as yourself, what would your advice be, and what challenges should they be aware of?
It is important to start from the right objectives. For us, coming into this, it was an introspective exercise where we were driven by non-complacency and humility, to figure out what needed to be improved. Then, without leadership support it would not have been possible to develop such an ambitious project as the Fund. The key for us in convincing leaders was to visually present and communicate the benefits of this approach, with case studies, data points, athlete testimonials, and other supporting communication assets. Another key factor was for us to create a win-win situation for the stakeholders coming into the Fund and learning to speak their language. The investment community is used to seeing business models, growth strategies, key performance and revenue metrics, and so we had to talk about our high-performance program and the investments we would make into it in the same way. Finally, I would say it is important to develop specific plans, governance structures, and milestones. With a large group of stakeholders, it is important to keep driving towards agreed-upon targets and objectives, and these institutional structures help us achieve this in an effective.