Patent Monkey: Fitness Week Edition

Barry Bonds will tell you: if you don’t take swings, you don’t hit home runs. In innovation, the same thing is rings true — you have to keep swinging until you hit a home run.

In honor of Fitness Week, we’ll take a look at some of the leading fitness players, like Nike and Adidas, in terms of patented technology, and take a look into just how many swings they’re taking. The leaders and the rest of the pack after the jump.

Not too surprisingly, Nike is a leader in patented technology with 70 patents issued in the past year and 474 total. While Nike is amassing a healthy position for itself in shoes and gear and, it has a been supporting a growing interest in golf.

At a high level, a search on “golf club” yields 4,023 patents while “running shoe” only yields 48. Golf is all about the equipment, so they say.

So, golf has a lot of patents? Callaway Golf is definitely leading the way in patenting their line of golf balls and clubs. They’ve got so many kinds of golf balls, they even have a online golf ball selector.

Adidas AG, owner of Reebok and TaylorMade, is a major player which is no surprise given their global distribution and brands. Also in the pack is Mizuno: a company that takes pride in making quality golf and running equipment. Wikipedia reports that Tiger Woods used Mizuno clubs during his college days. Mizuno has opted not to sponsor athletes, a fairly bold move.

Click to surf the recent technology of: Nike, Adidas AG, Mizuno and Callaway Golf.