This past Tuesday, we hosted our monthly Meetup in Barcelona. This month’s topic was Innovation with Euroleague Basketball. We had the pleasure of hosting Stephen Dobson, the Director of Partnership Activation and Platforms at Euroleague Basketball who guided us through Euroleague Basketball’s innovation journey.
Innovation is a ¨new¨ concept for many companies. In Euroleague Basketball’s case, the company decided to kickstart its innovation journey about 5 years ago. Today, for Euroleague Basketball, ¨Innovation is one of the core values of our business, and help us generate new ideas to address challenges or opportunities that the company might have¨. When they started their innovation journey, the strategy was unstructured and typically reactive. They started trying new things out but without a clear strategy in place. About 2 years ago, the Euroleague Basketball staff decided to make some changes and adapt a more structured innovation strategy. Also, they saw the need of being proactive.
The company made a shift in their innovation strategy to be able to implement a strong innovative culture internally, to bring new ideas, and to execute them.
¨We had a lot of new ideas but we did not have the people to execute those ideas so we created the Tech Challenge, a startup competition focused around on some business areas that we wanted to address¨
In case you did not know, Euroleague Basketball is the first major league to use referee footage, and to install mics and cameras inside of the locker room to capture the best pre-game moments, and to hear the instructions during the timeouts. Fans love this, coaches don’t!
When Euroleague Basketball thinks about innovative projects, the area they focus on is on data and stats.
¨We are always looking for new ways on how to tell a story using data and stats¨
Some of the innovative projects that Euroleague Basketball has worked on are:
- Sackathon with SAP – The crossroads between basketball, statistics and innovative storytelling was the subject of the Euroleague Basketball SACkathon, held in collaboration with world business solutions leader SAP, during 2 days of brainstorming by data science students from around Europe in a hackathon format.
- ¨Flight Time¨ sponsorship activation activity: The Euroleague Basketball and HEED platform launched a new way for fans to experience the Final Four. ¨HEED utilizes cutting-edge sensors, cameras and data analytics to identify a game’s most exciting moments, generate groundbreaking new insights, and deliver content, automatically, in near real-time directly to fans’ mobile devices¨. This new platform was used to analyze the flight time of each player during the game. The app showed a live ranking of each player, their accumulative flight time and also the individual interactions.
Some of the future innovative projects that Euroleague Basketball is currently working on are:
- They are looking at different options on how to keep introducing technology into the Final Four fan zone.
- To find a solution on how to measure, track, and analyze the flight time of the players without putting sensors into the players, just by using cameras in the arena.
The same day of the Meetup, just a couple hours prior to the event, the Euroleague Basketball launched the press release about the FAN XP Innovation Challenge. This project, led by Euroleague Basketball, powered by 4YFN and La Salle University, and with N3XT Sports as innovation partner, is an evolution of last year’s Euroleague Basketball tech challenge.
We hope you enjoyed our last Meetup of the year. Check out the photos from the December Meetup, and see you all in 2020!