The U.S. Men’s Olympic speed skating team devised a new approach to the team pursuit event following their disappointing performance in the 2018 Winter Olympics. The team saw promising initial results from their innovations, but they faced a decision about whether to reveal their new techniques. The U.S. Team’s strategy was easily imitated if competitors witnessed it in a race, but it was a risk not to test it in competition before the Olympics. And, were there possible upsides to imitation if it improved the entire sport? Should they share their techniques, and if so, when?
Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Rebecca Karp joins Brian Kenny to discuss the case, “A Winning Strategy: Innovation in Olympic Speed Skating.” They explore whether and when to launch a novel idea, product, or service, and what are the consequences—good and bad—to being imitated.
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 whi