Across the world, former fitness agencies are all morphing into something hopefully 'Active'. Ireland and Europe are the latest two (formerly ILAM and EHFA) who are now Ireland Active and Europe Active following the Fitness Industry Association morph into ukactive last year. Listening to St Mathew's Passion over Easter made me wonder if the global fitness industry, as it is, has the passion to change and grow the market. Perhaps too many organisations are keen to change their name to follow 'best practice' or worse, use 'common sense' to solve a current, insoluble problem. Perhaps the 'Active' movement has, just fallen asleep.

The facts are clear: Academics across the world continue to analyse 'frameworks for action', 'blueprints' and 'concepts' but fail to find any long-term positive improvement in increased activity or improvement in the overall health of any nation. At the last International Health, Racquet & Sports Club Association (the trade association serving the health and fitness club industry) convention a keynote speaker talked about 'confirmation bias'; when your contemporaries can't question or debate the here and now, or the future, for fear of offending anyone or disturbing vested interests. It seems we have had 'sustaining innovation', that is, innovation which does not affect existing markets, for too long. The leisure industry is ripe for change.

Disruptive innovation helps create a new market. GymFlex and PayasUgym are good examples of where innovation clearly seeing an annual contract system that is broken, receiving bad publicity, under investigation and scoring some spectacular own goals. GymFlex now has over 1,000 companies in its network while PayasUgym has over 1,700 sites and, is 'always cheaper than going direct or we will give you the difference back'.

Disruptive technology is even more exciting with the potential to reach a wider audience. For example, the top four sports tracking apps have a global audience of over 100 million but have no connection to sites. Splashpath, a swimming app came up with the idea of giving swimming pools free, easy to use software with which to maintain their pool timetables. At the time, most pools marketed themselves as though it was 1994. It was mostly out of date posters, diary events and 3-month-old pdf's on internal boards. Thinking as a consumer, a keen swimmer, and a water polo club captain, the developer of iOS apps and creator of Splashpath, Dan, saw how to disrupt these lazy sites and catapult them into 2014. In doing so he created a win-win for the pool operator and the consumer.

Over 30% of all public pools now use this embeddable timetable system including the newly opened Olympic Aquatic Centre. Hundreds of thousands of timetable views each week and over 100,000 registered swimmers tell him what their favourite pool is, how often they go, what they like and dislike about the experience. Some pools like the Triangle at Burgess Hill have over 1,000 customers favouring it.

Splashpath morphed into Speedo Fit a year ago and has launched in China, France and Ireland with roll out plans till Rio 2016. Speedo is a Great British heritage brand, which sponsors Olympic swimmers in over 160 countries and they see the app as a way of connecting with the day-to-day swimmer.

SwimIO, a new app for the Pebble watch, helps swimmers connect too. Pebble is not simply a swim-watch, it's a smart watch that runs a swim-watch app. For someone that loves notifications and is into the 'quantified self' the app/watch counts how many lengths you swim, it can tell the difference between swim strokes and provides the algorithmic data on your smart phone before you get back to the changing room.

The watch by itself is not disruptive but by adding Evernote, Time Warner, eBay, Nest Thermostat, Starbucks, Yelp, Pandora Music, Google Navigation and fun things like hourly photos from the Mars rover, it builds a following which will soon become a movement. After my Easter weekend ride I got a message about a PB from RunKeeper via my smart phone onto my watch, YES! The watch provides me with moments of awesomeness on a daily basis. This is innovation that is creating a new market, which ultimately (and unexpectedly) overtakes an existing market. My Pebble watch morphs daily into modern watch faces (yes it also tells the time), provides live weather and temperature, finds my lost phone, a 7-minute workout, and controls the camera on my iphone5.

Over 2,300 apps have been developed for this watch, which is part of a new trend, BYOD, (Bring Your Own Device). Some of your customers already do, so why not encourage it. There's a massive wave of wearable fashion, tech devices to choose from that is constantly changing; recently Nike announced it will no longer develop the FuelBand, while Facebook purchased the fitness tracking app Moves. Fitness will be less about the venue and product and more about the experience and instant feedback.

Google encourage feedback from employees who can devote one day a week to side projects that interest them, it's called 20% time. 20% is part of Google's internal debate on how an organisation generates the most valuable innovation. Employing talent is one thing, keeping it productively innovative and innovatively productive is another so the care, feeding and culture are a small price to pay. Do you have sustaining or disruptive innovation? How argumentative or even vituperative are you? It's time for change, it's time to morph, it's perchance time to disrupt.

David Minton

David Minton is the Director of the The Leisure Database Company, leading leisure market intelligence specialists working with the UK top health and fitness brands and with over 400 public and private sector clients. As a expert on developing technology in sport and physical activity, he delivered a seminar, Disruptive Sports Technology, as part of the Sports Business Seminar Series on 17^th June 2014 at University College London.

This article has been edited and the full version was first published in SIBEC UK14.