Day: September 4, 2014

I love writing about applying lessons from sports to the tech and game spaces, so an article I saw in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “What Businesses Can Learn from Sports Analytics” by Thomas Davenport, really resonated with me. Davenport is one of the people who have molded strongly my love of analytics, as his book Competing on Analytics initially got me thinking how the game industry could be improved by applying analytics. That the Oakland A’s are again one of the surprise success stories in baseball further reinforced the relationship of analytics and sports. In Davenport’s recent article, he shows how we can apply techniques used successfully in sports to tech or game companies.

Analytics is all the rage in sports. Davenport points out that every professional baseball team has an analyst on staff, while many professional football, soccer and basketball teams also do. Yet, other sports teams are behind many other industries because they are often smaller organizations and typically have old-school executives who do not appreciate the value of analytics. Although not applied universally, Davenport draws several lessons from how sports teams use analytics that are relevant to all businesses. Continue reading “Lessons from sports analytics”