Beijing Olympics 2008 - Showcasing Innovation

Every four years, the Olympics brings together the world's top athletes to complete for the ultimate glory. The event provides an interesting opportunity for various companies to showcase their innovativeness to a huge audience. Companies from a host of industries—architecture, technology, food production, and more have benefited over the years from working with athletes or local Olympic organizing committees to develop fresh ideas. This year the destination is Beijing, where a number of companies are displaying extremely innovative products and services in the hope to get a new growth curve going. A glance at some these is called for.

1) GE is providing a compact ultrasound machince, the LOGIQ i that produces detailed images of even the tiniest tears in a ligament, as sharp as those from the professional machines in hospitals. It's part of GE's strategy of using the Olympics to show off its latest innovations. GE deployed an earlier version of the LOGIQ i at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, giving researchers a chance to test-drive the equipment in a high-profile environment where extreme injuries often occur. Feedback from athletes and trainers, meanwhile, helped improve the machine. And just as important for GE, sales of its ultrasound equipment used for sports medicine have jumped 75% since Turin.

2) Kobe Bryant and LeBron James will sport Nike's Hyperdunk basketball shoes, which feature a webbing of liquid-crystal fibers that are five times stronger than steel.

3) In Beijing, Omega has introduced motion sensors (to spot false starts) and global positioning satellite systems (to track rowers).

4) French-Chinese tech company ASK-TongFang has developed radio-frequency-identification chips for the Games. The Beijing organizing committee wanted to eliminate counterfeiting of tickets, so it hired ASK-TongFang to make tickets with tiny computer chips that can hold various bits of information. For most events, these contain only fairly basic data such as the seat number, but for the opening and closing ceremonies each ticket will have the bearer's name, passport or ID card number, and other details.

5) The main stadium, by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, features an unorthodox steel structure that makes it look like a giant bird's nest. That spurred Chinese construction companies to learn hyper-precise welding techniques they had never attempted before.

6) The National Aquatics Center, nicknamed the Water Cube, is clad in a shimmering blue plastic coating that looks like bubbles. It traps 90% of the solar energy that hits the structure to keep the building warm, so the facility uses less energy to heat its five pools.

7) At the basketball stadium, an aluminum alloy skin reflects most of the sun's rays, so the gym's cooling system will use less than half the energy of a more conventional structure.

8) PowerBar, a Nestle subsidiary that makes vitamin-enhanced energy foods for athletes, has come up with a new, user-friendly package for an energy liquid that Nestle says can boost cyclists' speeds. These are used by bikers who want a quick blast of carbohydrates when their legs start to give out. But squeezing the sticky liquids out of foil pouches was messy. So Nestle researchers in Switzerland came up with the idea of bite-size gel casings that make it easier for athletes to handle the goop even while running or riding a bike.