Innovation, Sports, and Life Podcast

Concussions are a very serious topic that affects both adults and children alike. As we expect, they occur during strong physical impacts including accidents or hard contact sports such as American football. However, they are prevalent in a larger variety of sports.

In this episode, we talk to Dr Piya Sorcar, founder and CEO of CrashCourse and TeachAids. CrashCourse is a VR/HD video interactive curriculum by TeachAids to help athletes, parents, and coaches alike to better understand and evaluate concussions on and off the field. CrashCourse offers certifications in concussion knowledge and is partnered with 23 Olympic National Governing Bodies, Pop Warner Football, and more.

CrashCourse is a true leader in nonprofit global education innovation. In the episode, we talk about the course, its design, and the innovations in educating people on concussions. In the episode, we talk about the course, its design, and the innovations in educating people on concussions.

An innovation exercise generally means an ultra-positive event. It's kind of like an all you can eat sugary, sweet experience. And as we all know, anything unbalanced is not stable. Today, I want to talk to you about criticism and the key role it plays in innovation. One common misconception is that innovation means only positive thoughts. Anything critical is perceived as unfavourable, something which weighs the group energy down. We differentiate between a negative input and a critical input. Criticism means that you are judging the merits and determining the faults of an approach. We also take a look at the design thinking framework and which phases call for critical thinking. 

In this episode, we talk about how you can capture attention of your customers of your consumers in the shortest amount of time. With the least budget. We analyze marketing at mega sporting events such as superbowl, and world cup finals for cricket and football. We draw examples from movie marketing. Finally, we derive the technique to increase your chances of gathering highest visibility for your products.

Every sports team has at least one standout player. This person is someone that every team member looks up to. When the team is doing well, it's easy to attribute the success to this person. However, I'm sure you realize that the crew matters a whole lot more.

Similarly, in innovation projects you need to blend the talents of the creative thinkers with the teams perspectives. We dig into how to make that happen.

In this episode we talk about the principle of surprise – If you want to target new customers, want to offer than new products and services you must introduce a principle of surprise. Just the introduction of something new will not make then customers for life. There is a small nuance which we have to take care of and you will be successful in the long run.

In this episode, we discuss what do we mean by systems thinking and systems planning. This is a concept that a lot of businesses can benefit from. When it comes to entrepreneurs of small and medium sizes, adopting systems thinking can dramatically change your operations. You will eliminate most of the inefficiencies and this will directly impact your ROI.

 In this episode, we dig into how great companies are able to charge a premium that the customer is happy to pay. There's a very simple, clean, and straightforward process that they follow. We will discuss an amazing thing the blue bottle coffee company does. We also cover restaurants and car dealerships. The learnings will apply to other industries too.  

There's something uncanny about great sports teams. They figure out a way to get things done. There's something different about how they conduct their business. It's like wins show up for them even when they are not playing “hard”.

That's where the non-sports folks can draw good examples from. In this episode, we talk about how we can work on innovation projects. We discuss how to brainstorm and elevate ideas.

We also look at superstar teams that fail and what we can avoid in our lives.

In this episode, we will talk about journey mapping, and how you can use it to bring about interesting innovations. Whether you are making a product or services, mapping a customer's steps is one of the best ways to learn their journey. Learn what their pain points are, where you have opportunities for improvement, and what to solve.

I recently stumbled across a YouTube video, where a UI person is showing a mock up of a children's website. And he's showing this to a girl who is maybe five or six years old. This is essentially what we would call as a user study. However, without the digital knickknacks there was something very special about why he got amazing feedback. 

 Now unfortunately a lot of us spend a whole lot of time and energy and effort in the journey leading up to the prototype. We are so convinced in our processes that we end up creating the best prototype possible. It's almost as good as the finished product. However, we have ignored the user in a lot of these cases. You have left these huge blind spots. And the real user feedback can often come crashing right into into you.

That's where a lot of startup journeys also end, because they've given it their all in creating an amazing prototype, but one that did not resonate with their users. So prototyping has to be fast. It has to be cheap and you should try to get the user talking to you in the first place. Best of luck.