Park City—The first Thin Air Innovation Festival is officially underway. The three-day long event takes place this weekend in Park City and is centered around inspiring businesses and individuals to innovate their practices and team members.

At one of the four breakfast panels Thursday morning, a panel of elite athletes and executives shared their perspectives on innovation and team dynamics. The panelists were Dan Richards, CEO of Global Rescue; Luke Bodensteiner, EVP of athletics at the United States Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA); Paul Winsper, director of performance at Under Armour; and Richard LePage, director of coaching and performance at Cirque du Soliel. The panel was moderated by Tiger Shaw, CEO of USSA.

When a company originally launches with an innovative idea—and receives accolades or acclaim for its work—there is a temptation to rest on one’s laurels and take a break, or to let the ship sail itself. But, as LePage says, originality is quickly copied, as Cirque du Soliel’s success proves.

“Cirque started in 1984. It was an innovative format, and we were in a blue ocean where we were the only ones to do it. But now we’re the most copied theatrical [show],” says LePage. Cirque du Soliel has over 400 shows a year and roughly 14 million people a year attend Cirque shows. With so many other shows building off of the format, innovation is a must.

To that end, LePage says that companies shouldn’t be afraid of bringing in outsiders to refresh perspective.

“What we need to do is keep innovating our format, keep innovating our content. We’ve been pushing a lot. We define our process of innovation, we make sure that we bring in external people into our creations and—just to give you an idea, right now, we’re creating three new shows this year. That’s a lot of innovations that we need to bring forward,” he says. “One of the things we need to do to keep innovating is keep bringing new people in, to challenge how we do things, to be sure that we stay at the top of our game.”

Challenging a proven process is by no means easy. Sometimes, it’s necessary to look deeply into processes on a systemic level to affect the greatest change. For example, Winsper, who was once the fitness coach for Premier League soccer club Newcastle United and Major League Soccer club Toronto FC, said that he had long wondered whether the age-old process of “generic” training for athletes was really as beneficial as people thought.

“If an athlete goes into a training session and he does a bench press and he does squats like everyone does…are we actually taking time out of their recovery?” asked Winsper. “Was I taking energy away that they needed to recover from the generic soccer-based training that we didn’t need to do? We started getting razor-sharp in the gym. We became obsessed with efficiency.”

Instead of sticking with the tried and true, Winsper stripped the program and began to look at what would give his athletes the best gains. Mobility programs, he found, were better than strength-based programs. “We started to get the guys coming into the gym and do very specific sport programs that contributed to them being more efficient in their movement. That then resulted in an actionable gain on the field,” he said. “There was less metabolic cost to move in the game, with no restrictions on how the guys moved. That’s where my obsession with getting people moving and moving better, before we actually start to apply a load. That load could be in the form of speed, or endurance, or speed.”

For those concerned about diverting from the well-worn path, Bodensteiner suggests gathering as much data on your issue as possible. Data, he said, can help make decisions easier, since team members are likely to want to stick with what they know. When changing athletic programs, Bodensteiner said he often saw coaches would insist that they knew what was best based on their personal experiences and beliefs—but hard data said differently.

“The data that’s available now is incredible. You can get down into small, small details. It can be incredibly revealing,” said Bodensteiner. “And if you’re not open to really searching through that data and trying to understand it, it’s very easy to overlook opportunities. It’s very easy to lead yourself down a path that could be counterproductive.”