Technology innovations in sports: Typology, nature, courses and impact

Sport is undividable from technology innovations. History demonstrates that the development of physical culture and sports is an objective, regular process in the life of human society. At various stages of human development, changes are taking place in the field of physical culture and sports being determined by a certain way of culture, science and technologies. Thanks to sports innovations, it becomes more interesting, easier and more accessible for a wide range of people to watch and play sports, and moreover, to achieve high results and increase quality of life. Different innovations have a different impact. This chapter aims to extend a literature review on technology innovations in sports and propose a new typology. The literature review and analysis of transcribed data revealed a typology of technology innovations in sports industry, which are conceptualized under environmental, organizational and internal factors and illustrated by real life examples found by observations and qualitative open-ended interviews with international sports. The main goal of the chapter is to identify, describe and visualize the sports technology innovation concept through a typology, explaining sports technology innovations nature, courses and impact. It demonstrates that in some cases apparently opposed approaches actually lead to the same (or similar) classification results and conceptually different typologies often may overlap.