This article is in partnership with Taiwan Excellence
Winston Yang had a good life on paper. A degree from Columbia. Stints at Deutsche Bank and Deloitte. The kind of résumé that opens doors without needing an explanation.
But somewhere between the spreadsheets and the boardrooms, Yang couldn’t stop thinking about a problem that had nothing to do with finance at all.
He had spent years around athletes, watching the same painful pattern repeat itself at every level: school, college, and professional. An injury rarely just “happens”. It builds quietly first. A shoulder starts compensating for something months before anyone notices. A throwing motion shifts so slightly, week after week, that nobody clocks it, until the day it simply gives way.
Here’s the part that should make anyone worried: the technology to catch this early already existed. It just lived in labs that cost more than most sports programmes would see in a decade. So unless you were already at the top, already funded, already someone’s priority, you’d never get near it.
Yang decided that was a problem worth leaving a good career for. In 2017, he founded ‘IdeasLab Inc’ in New York with one question at the centre of it: what if any coach, anywhere, could have access to the same analysis that elite sports labs charge a fortune for?
The AI that reads what a coach can’t see
The answer Yang built is called ‘XView AI’. It does something that, until recently, would have required a room full of equipment and a team of specialists: it reads the biomechanics of a moving human body in real time, from nothing more than a smartphone video.
No sensors. No markers taped to limbs. No internet connection. No lab.
Point a phone at a pitcher mid-throw, and XView AI maps the joint mechanics, tracks rotation speeds, and flags the specific stress points that, if left uncorrected, can become the injuries that end seasons and sometimes careers. It sees the problem before the body announces it.
The proof arrived from an unexpected place.
The 2025 Grand Finals was held in Taipei in December. It included six finalist teams, 638 original proposals and 55 countries. IdeasLab Inc walked away as one of three winners, each taking home USD 30,000.
Among the early people testing XView AI was KJ Choi, a nine-time PGA Tour Champion and one of the most respected names in golf. His son quietly filmed his father’s swing without telling him, and ran it through the app. The AI caught something Choi himself had not: an early extension flaw and a contour failure buried deep in his mechanics. Choi fixed it.
One month later, at 54, he became the oldest Asian-born golfer to win a tournament, taking the SK Telecom Open. Three weeks after that, he won the Senior British Open. “I believe XView AI is the future of golf,” he said afterwards. He was so convinced, in fact, that he went on to become IdeasLab Inc’s first outside investor.
It’s this same technology that Yang would later build on for a much bigger stage.
In 2025, Taiwan Excellence, the certification mark that Taiwan’s government uses to champion the country’s best products and innovators, launched a global competition called ‘Go Healthy with Taiwan’, inviting health and wellness innovators from anywhere in the world to pitch ideas built around Taiwanese technology, with USD 30,000 on the table for the winners.
For his proposal, Yang took the same XView AI technology and pointed it at baseball, a sport where the mechanics of a single throw, repeated thousands of times, wear down shoulders and elbows long before the damage becomes visible.
The Smartedge Baseball system pairs XView AI’s software with Taiwanese smart apparel and wearable sensor technology, bringing in the hardware layer that makes the whole thing work at scale, and at a price point that doesn’t require a professional franchise’s budget to justify.
How Taiwan changed the trajectory
IdeasLab Inc was not arriving in Taiwan as a stranger to the ecosystem. The company had been building relationships there since 2021, when it partnered with the National Taiwan University of Sport. By then, KJ Choi, whose connection to Asian sport runs deep, had come on as the company’s first outside investor.
The Go Healthy with Taiwan programme, when it opened for applications, felt like a natural next step rather than a long shot.
The choice of baseball for the proposal was deliberate. The sport is as much a part of Taiwan’s cultural fabric as cricket is to India’s — choosing it gave the application a resonance that went beyond the technology itself.
The “Go Healthy with Taiwan 2026” global proposal campaign has officially launched. William Liu, Director General of TITA, stated that “Healthy Taiwan” is one of the government’s key policy visions, with the goal of making Taiwan the world’s preferred partner for health solutions.
What followed was the 2025 Grand Finals in Taipei in December. It included six finalist teams, 638 original proposals and 55 countries. IdeasLab Inc walked away as one of three winners, each taking home USD 30,000.
The company’s timeline around this period has moved fast. A first seed round of funding closed in February 2025. XView AI Pro launched in May. By July, three PGA-accredited universities — the University of Nebraska, the University of Central Oklahoma, and UNLV — had become the first institutions in the country to formally integrate the technology into their sports education curriculum. Cricket, tennis, and golf at a broader scale are next.
One prize, three very different ideas
Here is the thing about the 2025 winners that is easy to miss if you focus only on IdeasLab Inc: the other two winners had nothing to do with sports.
A Ukrainian organisation, the Charitable Fund “Medical Innovations”, used Taiwanese networking infrastructure to keep hospital systems and telemedicine functioning through active wartime conditions.
The problem they were solving was not inefficiency. It was survival — what happens when a health system’s core infrastructure becomes the emergency.
Another company approached an entirely different challenge. Swiss company Perovskia Solar AG partnered with Taiwanese manufacturers to develop energy-efficient healthcare technology powered by solar wearables, placing environmental sustainability at the centre of the design. Unlike solutions focused on improving existing systems, this one reimagined how healthcare technology could be powered in the first place.
Taken alongside sports injury prevention and wartime healthcare infrastructure, the contrast is striking. These are radically different problems, each demanding its own expertise. Yet they all followed the same path from idea to implementation: finding the right Taiwanese manufacturing partner and building something real together.
That range is not a coincidence. It is the programme’s entire argument: that the problems worth solving are everywhere, and the people best placed to solve them are already out there, working on them.
The road from application to the grand finals
The 2026 edition is now open, offering innovators more than just the chance to compete. The programme is designed to help promising ideas grow through mentorship and industry collaboration before the final judging even begins.
Go Healthy With Taiwan
Applications remain open until 5 August 2026 at 11:59 PM Taiwan time (9:29 PM IST). A preliminary review in early September narrows the field to around 20 semifinalists, who are evaluated through proposal documents, video submissions, and live questioning. The competition then moves to six finalists, announced in November ahead of the Grand Finals.
Even before the winners are announced, shortlisted teams receive personalised mentorship to strengthen their ideas, connect with Taiwan’s industrial ecosystem, and refine their pitches. The six finalists are then invited on a fully sponsored trip to Taiwan, with flights, accommodation, and meals covered, along with enterprise visits, direct exposure to the country’s health innovation ecosystem, and the chance to compete at the Grand Finals.
If they win, the top three teams each take home USD 30,000, plus dedicated support in building a real, working partnership with a Taiwanese enterprise.
The Taiwan connection that can give your idea flight
For Yang, integrating a Taiwanese product was not just a form requirement. It became the step that helped Smartedge Baseball move from a working prototype to a stronger, more scalable solution.
The system paired XView AI with Taiwanese smart apparel and sensor technology, a partnership that eventually helped IdeasLab Inc win.
This Taiwan link matters in the challenge, too. It accounts for a quarter of the final score, which can feel intimidating for applicants who have never worked with the Taiwanese industry before.
But that is where Taiwan Excellence comes in: a certification mark set up by Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs in 1993 to identify the country’s best products, judged on research and development, design, quality, marketing, and innovation. The mark is now recognised across 101 countries.
TITA has once again commissioned TAITRA to organize the”Go Healthy with Taiwan 2026” Global Proposal Campaign.
The challenge itself is backed by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council, a non-profit set up by the government alongside private industry.
The partnerships it offers come with thirty years of manufacturing relationships already built in.
For applicants who don’t know where to start, the programme has thought about that too. The Go Healthy with Taiwan website has a dedicated ‘Our Solutions’ section that maps available technologies across smart healthcare, sports tech, and the bicycle industry — a resource built specifically so applicants can explore what exists before committing to how their idea might connect to it.
The mentorship that comes with making the semifinal shortlist is designed to help close whatever gap remains.
Submitting is straightforward: register on the website, fill in the proposal form, and structure it around the programme’s STAR+ framework — situation, target, approach, result, and the Taiwan synergy that pulls it all together.
This is the same model that took Yang’s idea from a small office in New York to a stage in Taipei: bring the problem, find the partner, and let the mentorship fill in the rest.
Yang didn’t set out to build a Taiwan company, or a baseball company. He set out to give any coach, anywhere, the kind of insight that used to cost a fortune. The rest followed.
For someone in India sitting on a health or wellness idea that feels ready for something more than a pitch competition, this is a rare door to real funding, meaningful mentorship, and a direct route into one of the world’s most capable manufacturing ecosystems.
And that door is wide open until 5 August 2026.
For more information, please visit the official website: https://gohealthy.taiwanexcellence.org/
All images courtesy of Taiwan Excellence
