Erez Morag

Innovation Expert, Nike Game Changer

Categories: AI, Big Data, Branding, Business, Innovation, Leadership, Middle East & North Africa (MENA), Performance, Sports, Strategy, Technology

Former Nike Head of Global Football Research, Dr. Erez Morag is the CEO and Founder of Acceler8 Performance Ltd, focusing on high speed decision making in sports. See clearer, think quicker and respond faster.

Dr. Morag earned his doctoral degree from Pennsylvania State University in Exercise and Sports Science (1997). He holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Illinois. He has received prestigious awards for his scientific work, teaching, and innovation. In addition, he was awarded 14 patents since 1998 (including one on the Mercurial Vapor, Ronaldo’s shoe) and he has filed 8 additional patents.

Dr. Morag was recruited by Nike in 1998 to lead research in the areas of global football and women’s fitness. While at Nike’s headquarters in Oregon (1998-2011), Erez contributed to four unprecedented start-ups within the company. He was recruited initially to lead innovation research in the multi-billion dollar global football and women’s fitness industries. After a successful run with product innovations, he founded programs that linked product, advanced training, and business innovation. Two of these programs, Boot Camp and Nike Football+, utilize websites, apps, and field events to create football communities in over 25 countries worldwide. Not only do players get great shoes, they are invited to join an insider club of expertise. With the tag line, “buy world-class boots, access world-class pros,” Boot Camp and

Nike Football+ have reached and helped hundreds of thousands of players around the globe to get better.

Later, Dr. Morag founded Athlete Performance Insight, a program that harnesses the skills of superstar athletes to develop high quality product innovation. Top athletes are invited to the Nike Sport Research Lab in order to study their techniques and develop products that will enhance the players’ performances. In this role Erez worked with dozens of elite athletes including footballers Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Rooney, and Mia Hamm; basketball all-stars Manu Ginobili and Rajon Rondo; NFL greats Larry Fitzgerald and Greg Jennings; Olympic gold medalists Liu Xiang, Allison Felix and Sanya Richards; tennis legends Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.

Dr. Morag has retired from Nike in 2011 to return to his homeland (Israel) and continue his pursuit to help athletes get better. His work today focuses on high speed decision making, and his lab is one of a select few that is certified to utilize Nike SSP technology. A technology that is currently available in only 4 countries, and has been adopted for example by two leading football clubs in the UK, and by the Michael Johnson Performance Center.

In addition to his passion to help players and teams to perform at the highest levels, Dr. Morag is also an international speaker inspiring entrepreneurs, business leaders, and students to use sport science principles to enhance their businesses.

Programs

The programs offered by Dr. Morag can be delivered as a keynote or a half-day interactive workshop. What makes these programs unique is the fact that Dr. Morag and his teams have also personally implemented all the innovation principles described. Hence, concrete examples are shared with the audience.

Elevating Performance Through Innovation and Creativity

There are many similarities between world-class athletes and top business executives. They are competitive, they are willing to work hard to be successful, they are constantly trying to improve their teams, and they always look for a competitive edge. Hence, many of the metaphors used in the boardroom are derived from sports. In this program Erez takes the audience through a journey that describes how principles of sports science can apply to the business world, and help individuals and organizations elevate performance through innovation

In this session Erez shares:

Inspiration from the world’s best athletes to reach excellence
Sports science principles of guiding peak performance in sports
Application of these principles to business initiatives
Personal experience from his work at Nike of applying these principles applied to successful business initiatives

Bridging the Gap between Product and Brand Innovation

In today’s market, developing a hot new product is not always enough to excite consumers. In his talk, Erez demonstrates how to combine product innovation with innovative experience in order to drive performance results. This talk was first presented at Harvard Business School (HBS), and led to the publication of a full length HBS case study about Nike Football.

In this session Erez shares:

How to combine research, marketing, brand, and consumer insights to a compelling business initiative
The process of augmenting a product to give consumers reasons to buy
Creating a consumer journey that creates value-add experience
Shifting the paradigm from product innovation into innovative solutions

Erez brings a truly remarkable story and one that’s worth hanging on to and leveraging.
~ Harvard Business School

I have heard Dr.Erez Morag “TED like” presentation in an executive conference in Tel Aviv October 2013. The lecture was very dynamic and left me excited and full with new insights on the Importance and the benefits that the execution of innovation processes bring to organizations, and left feeling it is incremental in achieving higher goals.
~ Assaf Binstock, CEO Adkit

“We engaged Dr. Erez Morag as an external speaker for our internal Marketing Excellence Executive meetings in Warsaw and Bangkok, October 2013. Our main objective for these meetings was to motivate our marketing team leaders around the importance of Customer Centricity, gaining insights from that engagement and creating / delivering innovative solutions in achieving Marketing Excellence. Erez’s dedication, flexibility, commitment, and effort to adapt his speech to our audience and organization needs was the key to the success for these marketing sessions. Erez delivered a dynamic speech, full of realistic examples and relevant experiences that linked with the messages we wanted to deliver to our teams. He achieved positive audience engagement, and left our marketers and country leaders motivated and energized with new insights on the benefits that new innovative ways of Marketing bring to organizations. We highly recommend him for your meeting as an expert on customer centric innovation and marketing excellence.”
~ Craig Skelton, Abbvie

Your presentations provided a rare insight into the way global sports brands approach innovation, product development and marketing. Your themes and content had something for everyone – from the sports tech start-ups to sports product distributors and national sporting organisations. In short, we were engrossed by your stories working with global sports stars, stimulated by the science of sport innovation and inspired by the commercial success of the Nike start-ups you have been involved in creating.
~ Craig HIll, Australian Sports Technologies Network

Erez has a unique capability to feel the crowd, move on stage, and keep everyone waiting to hear what he says next.
~ Globus International

Erez Morag

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