BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the groundbreaking ideas in Harvard Business School case studies. Today on Cold Call, we’re looking at a sport where innovation doesn’t come from flash or funding, but from rethinking first principles. The sport is speed skating and we’re dropping this episode during the 2026 Winter Olympics. The US men’s Speed Skating team is coming off years of disappointment, searching for a breakthrough in the team pursuit event. The innovation works. Times drop, records fall, medals could follow. So the question at the heart of this case, and the one we’ll explore today is this: When winning depends on innovation, how do you decide whether your greatest advantage should be protected or shared? Today on Cold Call, we’ll discuss the case, “A Winning Strategy: Innovation in Olympic Speed Skating” with Professor Rebecca Karp. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.
Rebecca Karp’s research examines how companies formulate and execute strategies. In particular, she focuses on the role innovation and product development play and competitive advantage. That sounds absolutely appropriate for today. Welcome, Becky.
REBECCA KARP: Thank you so much for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: Great to have you on Cold Call. We’re doing this very quickly to have it coincide with the 2026 Olympics. So thanks for being flexible.
REBECCA KARP: Oh, what a pleasure to be here and what an ideal time. Did you know that the US is hosting the largest team ever it’s ever hosted in the Olympics before?
BRIAN KENNY: I did not know that.
REBECCA KARP: Yes.
BRIAN KENNY: Speed skating, by the way, is not a sport that I have followed closely. So I learned a lot actually from reading the case just about the sport itself. And it is really fun to watch, but the only time you really hear about it or think about it is during the Olympics.
REBECCA KARP: That’s totally correct. And to be honest, not a sport that I followed to either, except to know that over the years, I mean, the US for so many years was extremely successful in the sport. When you can think of many different kind of athletes who have graced kind of the podium for the US in the sport, but most recently we’ve definitely had a dearth of medals. So it’s interesting. That’s sort of what attracted me to this case a little bit was this question, why were we so successful? And then what happened? And then what could we possibly do to kind of come back to our old form?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And the case points out in great lengths that Norway apparently is the country to beat. They have just a huge gap in terms of the number of awards, the medals that they win versus other countries.
REBECCA KARP: So I think it’s the Netherlands.
BRIAN KENNY: Oh, the Netherlands. I’m sorry.
REBECCA KARP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Netherlands is just… Yeah. And which makes sense. All these stories about the canals freezing and then people skating on the canals. But you’re right. So if we think about the medal, like the all time greatest medal winners in the sport, it’s the Netherlands and then it’s Norway and then it’s the US.
BRIAN KENNY: So this is interesting because it’s one of those cases, we’ve been doing Cold Call for 10 years. We’ve done hundreds of cases. And every so often you get one that you’re like, “Wow, I never would’ve thought that that would be a case at Harvard Business School.” So I’m just wondering, you talked a little bit about it, but maybe a little more detail on how you came to, first of all, to hear about this, and then to think about this as something that would be worth bringing into the MBA classroom.
REBECCA KARP: So I think there’s this really interesting question that pretty much universally, almost all companies face, when should you launch a novel idea or a novel product? We can think about the film industry, like when should I put out that film? Is there a seasonally specific time or a new piece of software? And it may not always be the second it’s ready to publish, I should push it out. And so this question of entry timing, I think is just such a universal question. And so just sometimes academics are broadly interested in random topics. And I sort of remembered seeing as a spectator, as someone who’s super interested in the Olympics, the story unfold a little while back, four years ago now for the US, and being intrigued by it and then reading about it and learning that kind of the essential question for them was really this question about timing.
They had this really novel idea that they had developed, but this question about like, when should they launch this novel technique that really has come to dominate the field? So like pretty much everyone does the American Push now in the team pursuit events. And so that’s really what attracted me because it was such a good case of type situation for things that companies face, but sort of in this simple, scaled back way to really examine the dynamics of entry timing.
BRIAN KENNY: And I love the tie back to business, which is, of course, what we’re always doing here. The case does a great job explaining, as we just talked about, the huge gap, and it seemed like in the case of the US Olympic team, incremental innovation wasn’t going to get the job done. And we’re talking about like milliseconds, like tiny, tiny amounts of time here, but it seemed like they needed something, a step change of some sort. Can you talk a little bit about that and why incremental innovation just wasn’t going to work?
REBECCA KARP: Incremental innovation can get you there when you’re close, but really the US was so far away. I think it was something like four or five seconds from the Dutch. And that does sound like, as you said, a small amount, but realistically that’s a significant amount of difference in a sport where literally milliseconds matters. And so incremental innovation in this space was just not going to work, but there’s also this kind of approach or like mindset to innovation that is worth considering too. So in this case, incremental might not work, but also, if you take this back to kind of company perspective, you think there’s like companies that prefer incremental innovation or are strategically very good at executing on incremental innovation.
And some companies that are not, that really their special sauce is really thinking and re-imagining the way that the system or the industry could work and that’s really where they kind of source their competitive advantage. And so that’s also kind of a strategic decision, like whether you want to kind of be focused incrementally or if you really think that you have the skill to be able to kind of reimagine the system at large.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And I think the case also points out that this was not necessarily a matter of effort. Everybody was working really hard. The team was training hard. People were trying to get it done and just, it still wasn’t working. How was it that they sort of figured out a different way of looking at it rather than just saying, “Everybody put more effort in.”?
REBECCA KARP: Yeah. So I think the story a little bit as they tell it is such that they realized the additional extra effort just wasn’t going to do it. And so they brought in someone from the outside, which is so interesting here. They brought in an expert who actually had expertise in biking. And it was kind of this outsider who could see the world differently, who was like, “Why are we so focused on this and not this?” And I think that’s true oftentimes when we think about innovating in terms of re-imagining the system. These outside perspectives and being able to draw on these outside perspectives end up being like really useful.
And thinking about like innovation that takes you kind of, that makes a real step change in performance. And so what happened is, they brought in this expert with all this kind of expertise in the biking industry and he kind of figured out through watching them and they had this question, “Incidentally when we’re skating, we always end up kind of pushing each other, is this a good thing or is this actually a problematic thing?” And he learned through observing what they were doing that the pushing actually was critical. And if they could maximize the pushing, that they actually could kind of think about the whole way that they were approaching the race differently. But I’d reflect on again, it’s this outside perspective that really helped them figure this out.
BRIAN KENNY: But oftentimes, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in the firms that you’ve studied, we get this, I think we’ve referred to it as a not invented here mentality where, “That person doesn’t know our industry. They couldn’t possibly understand us well enough to be able to tell us how to do this better.”
REBECCA KARP: Totally. And I think there was much of that there too. And that’s why partially this question about when to launch became such an important piece of the puzzle. So when you have an outsider who comes in and kind of helps you re-architect the entire system, you need more touch points, more experimentation, more proof points that it actually is going to work and that we’re going to believe it. A major challenge for the team was, okay, we can see an expectation that maybe this technique will work better, but can we get the right athletes, the right… So then the question of talent becomes more prominent. Like, okay, it’s not just that we re-engineer the technique, but then we also need to attract the very best skaters on our team to come and race it. But what’s the incentive for them to do that, especially when you have this outsider who’s kind of designed this new system?
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah.
REBECCA KARP: Yeah.
BRIAN KENNY: For the benefit of our listeners who don’t understand the sport that well, forever, the way that speed skating was done was you had a team and you had somebody in the front and they would stay in the front for a while and exert all their energy and then they would drop off and somebody else would move up to the front and they would exert all their energy. And so what you had at the end of that race was for exhausted skaters and here what they were developing came to be known as the American Push, I think that’s the term that you use in the case, where instead of having everybody up front, one person stays up front and the others get behind and literally push them physically. And that’s the sort of where you get the bike racing analogy.
REBECCA KARP: Yeah, exactly. So like very akin to biking. The way the race always traditionally was run is as you put it, you would have your strongest skater out front and when he or she got tired, he or she would rotate to the back. But can you imagine just thinking about like the aerodynamics of this? When you’re going towards the back, you’re getting all this drag. And so the innovation here was like, how do we eliminate that drag? And the way you eliminate that drag is to have no one rotate and to move your best skater from the front to the back and have that person just push basically everybody else forward. And that eliminates kind of this drag and improves kind of the aerodynamics of the system. And that’s what helped kind of erase this gap in timing with the Dutch.
BRIAN KENNY: So how do you convince the other people on the team that this is worth doing? Again, we’ll go back to, you know, right back into the business sense, you’re trying to do something that is radically different than has been done before. There’s a lot of risk there. And on this grand stage, if you were to take this out into a competitive race, there’s the prospect of failure that could be really, really difficult.
REBECCA KARP: Sure. And beyond that, it’s not something like, Brian, you and I can show up and just do it.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
REBECCA KARP: Right? Like this is a team event. It’s the team pursuit. So there’s a level of training that needs to go into practicing this. So you’re talking to all of these skaters who, by the way, are also doing these individual races who have to make the evaluation. Should I expend my extra energy on working on my individual race so that I can win gold? Or should I try this new technique that I’ve never skated before that requires coordination with these other athletes to layer another complication? It’s not like these athletes live next to each other, and so they still have to practice together. So now I have to do something I’ve never done and I have to locate with the people on my team that I’m doing it with. So this all adds complication and for someone who believes that they might medal in an individual race, should the very best talent be expending kind of their resources, time, budget, because remember, the US team is not funded by the government.
People are self-funded or they’re getting sponsors. So there’s this big, huge resource, time, attention, question associated with expending kind of those things on learning the technique. And I think, but this is like not untrue if we bring the contrast back to the business world of, we have this new approach and you want to get your very best people in the company working on the new approach, refining the new approach, but why should they expend their time, attention when they’re probably already working on their own projects, their own agenda? So this is like a very parallel type situation to I think what many companies face when they try to get their very best people to work on something that’s new.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s also a bit of an all or nothing thing. You can’t do this and say, “Well, we’re going to try this, but we’ll keep doing it the way that we used to do it.” You’ve got to make the decision. How does a leader think about that in a business context? When is it okay to do something, again, incrementally as we talked about before, or when do you need to just say, “We got to completely redo this thing.”
REBECCA KARP: Yeah, I mean, I think in the case of the US team, it was very clear that they were not going to win unless they made a remarkably-
BRIAN KENNY: That makes it easier.
REBECCA KARP: It makes it easier. Things are not always that clearcut in the business arena, but we can think, how much do you lag your competitors? Is it realistic that you’re really going to close the gap by increments, adding another feature to your product? But also, if you add another feature to your product, do you kind of make the product more similar to that of your competitor and thus you’re not creating any differentiation or distinction in the way that you can win anyway. And so, I think companies are quite afraid to reimagine the system often for the reasons we described. Convincing the best people to work on it is often hard. They have all sorts of other obligations, but in the same regard, sometimes that’s exactly what’s required if you want to win.
BRIAN KENNY: A spoiler alert, because you actually wrote a B case, which I love because the B case kind of tells us what happened here. You want to talk a little bit about the results that the US Olympic team experienced?
REBECCA KARP: So in the case, this question of timing is really the central question we ask in the case, and it’s whether the US team should launch the technique in the world championship, which is two years before the Olympics. And so spoiler alert, they decide to launch two years earlier. And the rationale for doing that is really to satisfy some of the questions you asked earlier. It was to show that the technique was quite good and it assured kind of the very best talent that it was worth their while to invest their time and effort in the technique. It also helped them get kind of other sponsors on board because they became more competitive. So it helped them mobilize and acquire resources, meaning like the US team. So that was sort of the rationale for doing it. The challenge is, the second they kind of let the genie out of the bottle, all of the other teams were able to observe what it was that the US was doing.
BRIAN KENNY: Which was their fear, which is a legitimate concern. So how do you think about that, again, in a business context? I mean, there is such a thing as first mover advantage, but we all know that there are fast followers who can sort of chip away at that. As a business leader, how would you think about the risks there?
REBECCA KARP: Yeah. So it’s interesting. We teach this in the case too. So the first question you have to ask is, is it so that nobody really knows about this thing that we’re doing? Like, is it really-
BRIAN KENNY: Are we the only ones who know?
REBECCA KARP: Is this really so secretive? Because in the case of the US, it’s probably true that it wasn’t. I don’t know for sure, they would know better, but it’s reasonable to think that skaters were aware of what the US is doing. It’s a small community of people. It’s reasonable to think that other teams were experimenting similarly. Novel or twin innovation happens all the time. And so what were teams really evaluating when the US raced was probably how well the technique worked. So it wasn’t that they were just becoming aware of it, it was really how well the technique worked. So that’s the first question you really have to ask is like, are your competitors already aware of it? And then secondly, what are they really learning from you when you launch something? Is it like awareness or is it really like they’re learning something about performance?
And the third question you have to kind of ask is like, would you do anything differently if it changes one of those two things? And I think in the case for the US, they really couldn’t because of these needs to kind of get the best talent interested in the technique or to get kind of sponsors mobilized. I think there were these other reasons why they needed to launch at the time. Or it’s also possible that they mispredicted how long it would take others to perfect the techniques. So it took them about a year and a half, two years to perfect the technique. And it’s possible that they extrapolated that timing onto others, but that’s another question you have to ask. If I launch this now, what’s the learning curve for others? Is it that they will learn at the same speed that we learned or is it that they will learn at a faster clip?
And if it’s true that they were already aware of the technique, it’s very possible that they’ve already been working on it and thus their learning curve is going to be shorter or they will have started the learning process such that they can apply it faster than we would have expected. So those are some of the core questions I think you need to ask about the launch or the entry timing decision. The other thing we think about in class frequently is about like the nature of what you’re sharing. So in this case, the technique once seen cannot be unseen.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, of course.
REBECCA KARP: And it’s highly replicatable. You see what people are doing and maybe to perfect it, you need some more specialized knowledge, but you can kind of start to, you understand what’s going on. Not all types of products, knowledge are so easily replicatable by others and thus thinking about the entry decision is different based on kind of the nature of the information that’s getting shared.
BRIAN KENNY: So some things might be harder to imitate than others, which means you might have a little more sustainable advantage than you actually realize that you had.
REBECCA KARP: Exactly.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. I’m just wondering also about how winning changes sort of incentives around openness as you unveil this thing and it starts to work. Do you just sort of get excited by it and say, “You know what? We feel like we’re going to continue to innovate and we don’t care if people see how we do it because we think we can do it better.”
REBECCA KARP: So I love this question. I think that that’s exactly right. I think my guess, and having no real knowledge about their perspective, is the better you get at innovating, the more you do it. And so perhaps… So what ends up happening is they launch the technique in the world championship and when it comes to the Olympics, the Norwegian team and the Russian team follow suit and they end up beating the US team. And so the US team ends up competing for bronze and they do win the bronze medal, but certainly, which is fabulous because they haven’t won a medal in so long. It’s better than nothing, and kudos to them. And also, that was during COVID, there was so many complications associated with that win, but they certainly did not win gold and their competitors indeed did copy their technique.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
REBECCA KARP: But I think what it’s done is fostered this interest in innovation. And so I would expect that they continue to innovate in ways that kind of are really productive and help them kind of get on top.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. Now it’s interesting because the whole conversation, we’ve been sort of toggling back and forth between sports and business and I want to reverse the toggle at this point because in business, you have things like intellectual property, you have legal rights to ideas when you get there and you can file a patent. That’s probably not the case in sports training. And I’m wondering, as you think about this, is there a way that they could be somehow protecting what they’re doing or should they be thinking about that?
REBECCA KARP: I think that that would be quite hard, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
REBECCA KARP: And I do think even in the business arena, of course, there’s a lot of information that even if protected is not necessarily goes unshared. So IP protection is hugely valuable to companies, but there’s a lot of innovation that cannot be kind of protected. You could think about like the assembly line innovation that Ford created, certainly like a revolutionary concept that now is widely used and was not patented. So there’s tons of different types, particularly process innovation that’s more difficult sometimes to patent, similar to kind of the American Push, not really a way to kind of patent that.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And we’ve actually, as I think about it on Cold Call, we’ve discussed cases before where innovations were shared as a way to elevate an entire industry. So a firm comes up with an idea, they’re trying to get all the boats to rise at the same time because they want to elevate the industry itself. So there’s another possible reason why you might share an idea or an innovation.
REBECCA KARP: 100%. I mean, exactly right. Let’s just say, like bringing it back to our speed skating example, let’s say it’s a fabulous sport, but maybe doesn’t get the eyeballs of some of the other sports. If you’re able to improve the competitiveness of the sport altogether, then are you able to draw more eyeballs and as a result, more sponsorship? So thinking about kind of the collective is certainly another reason why one might share an innovative idea or product broadly.
BRIAN KENNY: This has been a really fun conversation, Becky. I knew it would be. And I’m so glad, again, that we were able to do it during the Olympics. If there’s one thing you want people to remember about the speed skating case, what would it be?
REBECCA KARP: I would like them to remember to really think about when they decide to launch a novel idea or product or service and what it means if you are imitated. What’s the result of that on your business and what’s the next step? It’s inevitable that it’ll happen, so what are you going to do next? And then if I might say, go U.S.
BRIAN KENNY: I was going to say that too. We do have a global audience, but we’re going to say “go U.S.” because we’re both here in the United States.
REBECCA KARP: And yay! I hope the U.S. Speed Skating team does great this year.
BRIAN KENNY: I’m right with you. Becky, thanks for joining me.
REBECCA KARP: Pleasure.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
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