SportsTech: INNOLAB Bilbao and BCAM bring technology to the sports industry

Leading figures from the sports and digital sectors met yesterday at the conference held in Bilbao on technology and sport.

Yesterday, the Ensanche Building hosted the conference "SportsTech: Sport and Technology, trends and opportunities" organised by INNOLAB Bilbao and BCAM (Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics) with the aim of raising awareness of the opportunities offered by new technologies to the sports industry, through the presentation of success stories from the Basque business ecosystem.

Technology is undoubtedly gaining ground in the world of sport, facilitating numerous advances in countless fields. At the SportsTech conference, which was a full house, some of the advances in digitalisation achieved in sport were shown, allowing "to relate the performance of athletes and the health of sportsmen and women or to understand data in order to attract fans and consumers more effectively". This was emphasised by Dae Jin-Lee, Data Science Coordinator at BCAM's Knowledge Transfer Unit (KTU) and keynote speaker at the conference: "Technology, data analytics and sport: a winning team".

Technology has transformed such essential areas for the good performance of professional and amateur athletes, such as scouting, nutrition, training and/or coaching. Areas that were also addressed throughout the day by experts in the sector such as Isabel Iturbe, President of Bilbao Basket and Rafael Pueyo, Sports Director of the same club, who presented the prototype of their own scouting tool based on Advanced Statistics developed together with BCAM and INNOLAB Bilbao within the framework of the INNOLAB open innovation programme.

The AZTI Technological Centre presented the project worked on with Athletic Club, showing how technology can be a great ally when it comes to guaranteeing a more precise and adequate diet for sportsmen and women.

In turn, Kimet Sport, RUNNEA and Futboltek demonstrated that Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are a key factor in the promotion of sporting talent, planning and individualisation of training sessions and the progression of each athlete.
Itxaso Erroteta, Councillor for Youth and Sport of the Bilbao City Council and Jon Iriberri, Head of the Digital Transformation programme and manager of sports programmes of the Basque Government, also took part in the event, highlighting that "sports agents must address the challenge of Digital Transformation in order to respond to the future demand of participants and consumers. Innovation, applied to materials and services, will differentiate the main sports players from other non-transformed ones that will be progressively reduced or disappear".

A unique opportunity where it was demonstrated, as explained in the keynote speech, that technology and sport form a winning team.

About INNOLAB Bilbao

INNOLAB Bilbao (www.ilb.eus) is an open innovation platform where talent, technology and industry merge to launch new digital solutions to business challenges. Born thanks to the impulse of the Bilbao City Council, it added to its own capacity the resources of private companies, Iberdrola, Mondragon Corporation, BBK Foundation, IMQ Group, University of Deusto, BCAM (Basque Center for Applied Mathematics), El Correo, Inkolan and Tecnalia.