Interview with Mathieu Lacome, the newly appointed Head of Research & Innovation at Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). His previous role within PSG was Head of Research & Development during which he designed the research strategy of the club, managed a wide portfolio of projects, and developed a framework for developing national and international collaborations with top academic and research organizations.
1. Mathieu, can you tell us more about your role within PSG and also could you briefly explain the reason behind your new role/position?
After a decade of immense growth and success in terms of the club’s commercial, brand and football objectives, the executive management took the time to pause and project themselves into the future with a focus on the 2020-2025 period. A clear asset within the club is its people, both on and off the pitch. On the pitch we can count on the greatest players in the world. Off the pitch, we have creative, innovative and passionate people who have developed the club into a global powerhouse in such a short period of time. To build on this business & football talent off the pitch, PSG decided to invest into setting up an Innovation unit that can harness the collective wisdom of the club and channel it towards the creation of future products, services or experiences for our fans and players.
My role in this vision is to enable PSG to achieve its business, commercial and football objectives through research & innovation.
On the research side, I lead a team of PhD students and researchers, involved on a daily basis with the different teams, to solve sports & data science research questions. To help us do this, I continuously develop academic partnerships & strategic collaborations with leading research groups such as INSEP and École Polytechnique in France, AUT SPRINZ and many others.
On the innovation side, we have three main activities. The first one is related to accelerating innovation projects through the use of rapid & early experimentation processes. Second, we are building a world-class innovation ecosystem to promote multi-disciplinary knowledge sharing and to shorten the time it takes to solve challenges; this is done for the club and also our different partners. Finally, one of our activities is to explore new technological use-cases in depth through expert interviews, lightning demos and customer-journey explorations.
2. How did PSG decide to start its innovation journey? And why? What’s the importance for a right holder to have an innovation strategy in place?
As mentioned earlier, the discussion started two years ago. The club was entering a new phase after a period of exponential growth. After some successful initiatives, and being the first club of the new generation, the club wanted to position itself as a game-changer in sports. Before starting, we knew the value of having a clear strategy in place that can guide us internally and help us communicate with our partners to join us on this journey. We focused on understanding our strengths & weaknesses, benchmarking in and outside the sports industry, and defining our role in innovation and who to partner with to develop the projects.
3. Could you name a few innovation mechanisms that PSG has implemented or is thinking about implementing?
Over the past few years, we have tested several innovation mechanisms. One of the first was Open challenges. We created the Sports Analytics Challenge (data) and recently the Football Box challenges (design). It allows us to source ideas at scale and quickly solve internal challenges. While it is very beneficial to develop Open challenges, there are many ideas that are “first draft ideas” that will require further development to reach a maturity that makes it business-ready for us.
We used innovation days or weeks in collaboration with universities to brainstorm new concepts using design thinking, C-K or different innovation methods.
Internally, we started an intrapreneurship program before the COVID pandemic. We collected more than 60 business or socially-responsible ideas and 10 of them were pitched in front of the executive team of the club. We finally chose four ideas for early testing and potential experimentation. While COVID-19 shifted some of the strategic priorities of the club, making some of the selected ideas not viable in the current context, we were very pleased with the internal cultural shift. We also stand by the proven adage that failing fast through these kinds of programs helps us accumulate learnings quickly.
In 2021, we aim to expand our innovation toolbox by launching startup experimentation tracks and asset sharing initiatives.
4. What are some of the most valuable learnings in your innovation journey so far?
So far, the journey has been good thanks to the support of internal stakeholders. One theme that has proven to be an important investment of our time and efforts is the topic of education. Innovation is sometimes regarded as a buzzword and is not similarly understood by different stakeholders. Our role is to make everyone at the club as well as our partners understand that innovation is a strategy, aligned with our business strategy. Importantly, it is a new collection of processes, tools, milestones, projects and reporting mechanisms that allows us to achieve our business objectives.
Another learning is to adopt a startup mentality, building, measuring and learning in a very rapid fashion. We aim to show results before spending big, starting with as little resources as possible. This elevates the importance of the strategy because as a startup within the club, we need to maintain laser focus to achieve our objectives. We have an ambitious plan to improve our internal and external communication efforts around innovation, create frameworks that work for the club’s employees & decision-makers as well as our partners, and to build a self-sustaining ecosystem, and to properly leverage innovation as an incremental catalyst to our overall club business plan.
If you would like to know more about different innovation mechanisms, you can find them in our Football Innovation Report