From Couch to Olympics: How Open Strategy Saw the Future of Esports

International Olympic Committee recently made waves by announcing the first Olympic Esports Games, which Saudi Arabia will host in 2025. For many, this sounds far-fetched even today. Now, imagine how outlandish this idea would have seemed a decade ago.

In 2015, I and my MLab colleagues were helping a global athletic brand implement an open strategy process that hinted at this future. We trained thousands of employees to generate novel insights by challenging conventional industry wisdom, identifying emerging trends, and uncovering unmet customer needs. Participants generated several thousand unique insights, which formed the basis for a thousand business innovation ideas. These were then peer-reviewed and prioritized based on collective input.

One standout idea focused on creating dedicated apparel for esports—competitive, organized video gaming where professional players, either as individuals or teams, compete in popular games like League of Legends, Fortnite or Dota 2 for prize money.

The executives were skeptical. Competitive gamers reminded them of their couch-bound adolescents kids, and not of the next Serena Williams or Cristiano Ronaldo. But the insights supporting the proposal were solid. It turned out that esports pros were indeed athletes who experienced significant stress and surges in heart rate. They also possessed extraordinary skills, such as reaction speeds under 200 milliseconds (faster than football players) and the ability to perform about 500 discrete actions per minute. These gamers needed performance wear just as much as traditional athletes—and their passionate fans would want to buy the same gear. The time was ripe to challenge industry orthodoxy.

Several social and technology trends were also pointing to strong growth potential. Although esports was still in its infancy, it was already capturing young people's attention, especially in places like South Korea (For instance, in 2014 a League of Legends final drew a crowd of 40,000 in Seoul, and 27 million watched it online.) With gaming and live-streaming platforms like Twitch gaining popularity, this trend was likely to continue.

Despite their initial skepticism, the executives didn't dismiss the idea—they had to respect the wisdom of the crowd. Two years later, the company became the first major athletic apparel brand to strike sponsorship deals for top teams and introduce esports merchandise (it remains the most prominent brands in esports). This bet paid off, as esports has since experienced exponential growth. As of 2022, there were 260 million regular viewers globally, with top players earning seven-figure incomes. 

To me, this is a beautiful illustration of the power of throwing open the strategy doors. Often, it's the people at the edges of an organization who spot the future first.

So, what are you doing to involve your whole organization in shaping strategy? Some ideas for getting started:

1. Invest in building creative skills. Companies are often frustrated when they ask employees or customers for ideas. Much of what comes back is either small beer or undoable. To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, you have to train people to think differently.
2. Crack open the strategy process in simple, low-cost ways. If the idea of a high-profile strategy hackathon seems daunting, start small. Make sure every future-focused meeting includes a disproportionate number of young people, newcomers, and individuals who’ve worked in other industries. In another company I know, managers present their plans before hundreds of young employees who live-tweet criticisms and suggestions. The point is, there are lots of ways of getting new people into the strategy conversation.
3. Make it social. The power of open strategy isn’t merely the number of ideas that get generated, but the combinatorial magic that happens when ideas collide and curious people interact. On an online strategy platform, this means making it easy for innovators to find colleagues who are working on similar ideas and then collaborate if they choose to.
4. Link ideas to action. Most organizations have some sort of online suggestion box, but submissions often disappear into the ether. Employees want to know, “Who is going to review my idea? When? Against what criteria? If it has merit, how will it get resourced? Will I get time to work on it?” If the answers to these questions aren’t clear, many contributors will opt out.
5. Challenge the notion that strategy is the exclusive domain of the C-suite. This is a hard one, but only then will an organization get serious about open strategy.