Technology, Innovation, Data and Digital
Technology is playing a part in encouraging participation in a way it never has before, and every indication is that its influence will continue to grow, with more than 50,000 health, fitness and physical activity apps now available.
Fitbit is now estimated to be worth $4bn worldwide and Strava is gaining 100,000 new members globally each week and logged more than 520 million kilometres of cycling in the UK alone last year. Given the changing ways in which people consume sport and the continued rise of online social interaction, we need to ensure that sport is able to react these changes and can provide consumers with what they want, in the way they want it. New technology is not a complete solution, but it is a vital means by which participation can be encouraged.
It can help identify opportunities to take part, link up players with teams, monitor individual progress, share success with friends and set new goals and challenges to aim for. We should remember, however, that access to technology varies signifcantly between groups so, like sport, technology also needs to be made more accessible.
Sport is also enormously data-rich, and there is potential to harness this data in a way that helps consumers directly, but that can also help build further insight and understanding on how people participate and why. Government is interested to know what sources of data sports bodies (both public and private sector) have that, if made publicly available, could help the sector to develop or help to enable more people to take part.
Page content from A New Strategy for Sport: Consultation Paper.
Sport England Uniting the Movement
Posted: Mon, 15 Feb 2021 11:21
Five main challenges
Sport England identifies five challenges facing the sector:
- Recover and reinvent from the impact of the pandemic to build a vibrant, relevant and sustainable network of organisations
- Connecting communities to leverage the potential of sport and physical activity to make better places to live and bring people together
- Positive experiences for children and young people to create the foundations of a long and healthy life
- Connecting with health and wellbeing to ensure that everyone can feel the benefits of an active life
- Active environments to make it easier for people to move more
Tackling such big challenges is not the responsibility of one organisation or one initiative alone, and we need to work together.
More information: https://www.sportengland.org/why-were-here/uniting-the-movement
Tags: Sport, Sport England, technology
Resources and Links
This is such a wide topic area we can only hope to stay involved in the big strategic decisions. We hope that providing links to the key resources this will be a helpful landing page over time.
Open Active
Open data has the potential to create value and drive innovation in the sports and physical activity sector.
Further details of Open Active can be found on their website.
Key people and links
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