2020 was an interesting year for sports to say the least. With unprecedented nation-wide lockdowns leading to sports leagues suspending their seasons, sports tech companies couldn’t rely on their traditional methods to land a profit this year. This led many to wonder how some of these companies were going to make it through the year. While government aid and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans may have provided some assistance, the true winners of the year turned to a sports fundamental to try and find their way into the paint: the pivot. 

While this pivot might not be the old-school basketball pivot, the idea of the two is the same, if one lane is closed then turn to another. In the case of these sports companies, the lane that may have closed was sports but at the same time, the lane that opened was COVID. Companies rebranded their technologies to not only be sports solutions but also COVID solutions. At the forefront of this trend were companies like Kinexon, a company that was commended for taking its existing technologies and applying them to new problems faced with COVID, landing it an award for being SportTechie’s 2020 Pivot of the Year, an award SportTechie created for this unique year.

Kinexon provides a tracking solution that implements sensors placed on players and beacons around the stadium to track players on the field. When it noticed the necessity for contact-tracing for sports teams to help mitigate the spread of COVID, the developers implemented sensor-to-sensor communication to allow sensors to determine which other sensors they are in close proximity with. This easy and accurate method of contact tracing helped them to gain contracts with top sports leagues. 

While the quick turn-around of this technology left for little patenting surrounding the technology, it does show the benefits of having a broad patent portfolio with broad claim sets to allow for the technology a company develops to be applied to unexpected applications. Before the year started, who would have known you would need a method of tracking every person you came within six feet of? You never know what unexpected challenges might require unique implementations in the future. Use patent data to predict what companies may have an advantage in these unique times by getting our Patent Forecast® for Sports Analytics.