Of Stadiums, Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Part II

Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

We often hear these words in the world of business. Everybody has heard the stories of Facebook, Google, Apple, Instagram and how the entrepreneurs behind those companies lead them all the way to enormous success. Innovation was the key ingredient behind their success, and we often hear companies name it. But what exactly is innovation in simple terms innovation is to create an improvement of a product, service or a way of doing things. For example: before the iPod, listening to your favorite music was really complex you had to buy CD’s and use a Discman; another example: before Facebook the only way to know what your friends where up to at the same time was to meet with them physically. This is innovation and it happens constantly in many industries. Both of these concepts when used correctly can create sustainable, efficient and profitable organizations. Entrepreneurship and innovation allow any business to maintain a cutting edge in their market, by fomenting quick design, iteration and mostly interaction with potential customers. The combination of both of them gives us the Lean Start-Up philosophy, a unique way to create new innovative businesses.  

So why is it that the world of sports and especially professional sports teams seem left behind, and don’t really embrace entrepreneurship & innovation? In the world of soccer, teams are notorious for having bad management, long-standing debt and for providing a  not so great  experience for their fans (customers). We at Passionis want to change that, we want to help any team become just as innovative and entrepreneurial as any technology company out there. This could benefit the results on the pitch and off it as well. How could we do this?

The first step is to use the business model canvas, we have to start viewing our organization in a more organic way; it is a living entity and we have to shift the perception that it is static, to a perception of constant upgrade. Gone are the days of doing a business plan and believing it would work, instead we have to use the business model canvas to create hypotheses and test them to validate our model, experimentation has to be embraced. 

For any startup it is essential to understand every part of the business model canvas in this post we will continue to focus on the ValueProposition. The value proposition is what makes us unique; it represents what we give to customers that nobody else can. Basically is how we make them happy.  Let us pretend we are a soccer team and we want to use the business model canvas to turn our organization into a sustainable, debt-ridden, profitable business, while maintaining the results on the soccer pitch. We want to create a value proposition for our model, some of the questions we need to answer include: which customer needs are we satisfying? Which one of our customer’s problem are we helping to solve? And most importantly what value do we deliver to the customer? So this is how our  canvas might look like at the beginning.

We have crafted an initial value proposition: we want to build a connection, we want to provide the best entertainment with an immersive experience and provide related products to help our revenue. Ok this sounds great but we need to understand if this seems attractive to our customers, we need to bring them into the conversation to validate our theory. How can we do this? 

We could use a website where we create prototypes of the products and ideas we believe can help us deliver that value proposition. Then we interact with our fans and we show them our minimum viable product(s) and hear what they have to say about it. All that information will help us understand how we can serve our customers needs and create something that makes our team truly unique.

We want to help create the best sports organizations in the world. We want to enhance the experience for all the stakeholders in the world of sports. At Passionis we want to help any team design, build and utilize innovation & entrepreneurship on a regular basis. Stay tuned as we will continue to work on our business model. 

Passion is our innovation! 

Inspire Change.

Fact: There are no bad players. Only bad man management.

Have you ever seen a player play an spectacular season, transfer to a new team for the next season, play poorly, transfer again and start playing incredibly again? Well, this happens quite often in the world of sports, especially in the world of soccer. Rising players shine, they create enormous hype for themselves and then they can’t live up to expectations. Most people would deem that player as inadequate, however there are deeper issues related to this phenomenon.

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski discuss some of the common misconceptions and mistakes professional teams continuously do when buying players and managing their teams, and these issues affect all the organization from the coaching staff (manager) to the executive directors of the team. They this discuss these issues in the book “Soccernomics”. However we will focus on one of the aspects they mention, and that is effective man-management. First of all, most teams forget that players are more than assets, they are human beings and they have needs, emotions, insecurities and most of the same issues we ourselves have. Quoting the authors of Soccernomics, “ many transfers fail because of player’s problems off the field. Moving to a job in another city is always stressful; moving to another country is even more so.  All the inefficiencies surrounding relocation could be assuaged.” That is the first issue; players need to be as comfortable off the pitch in order to perform better on it. This issue can be easily resolved and some teams have begun doing it with a relocation assistant, or Human Resources department. The other part of the issue is when the manager and the coaching staff make terrible man-management.

This issue has to do more with leadership rather than technical capabilities. Let’s use an example: imagine you are the manager of a big investment fund and you have different assets at your disposal: a clothing company, a real estate property and a shopping mall. Each of them have unique qualities and it is evident that you can’t expect that the same formula can be used to manage each of them, every asset is unique and “plays” in a diverse industry with its own rules, so different strategies have to be put in place in order to achieve the goal of your investment fund of generating profit with each asset. Well the same happens with players, each of them with unique capabilities, strengths and even weaknesses, you can’t expect them all to be the same. So what do we do?

Most managers tend to force their system and way of playing into the team, and if necessary replace players just because they want to. This shows a lack of empathy. A team and its manager must understand that the team is composed of individuals that have to be guided and motivated to follow their leader. A great example of this is Diego Simeone.  Creating a successful team can be done in any scenario, with star players, without them or with homegrown players; just as failing with any of them is viable as well.

Ok so we got it, there is more to coaching, mostly leadership, how can we correct this situation? First of all there has to be a shift in the strategy; instead of thinking in the short-term teams have to become experts at long-term strategy, working in the present moment but with their eyes set in the future and the benefits that such changes will bring. Of course there is the present need to win matches, but that doesn’t mean a team can start building their long-term strategy while aiming to win matches now, and slowly start shifting towards this new model. Second start analyzing current leadership mistakes, and start training their staff and create an organization where people feel motivated and where they can actually grow both on the field and off it. This will yield more results than spending huge sums on great players. Soccer is just like any other business and it can be effectively managed. Look at great corporations where a unique culture is in place with a responsible leader, companies such as Virgin and Apple are great examples, their leaders managed to inspire, motivate and make their staff rise to the challenges and they have literally changed the world. Inside those companies there are people just like you and me, they have eyes, legs, arms, a brain, everything we also possess, there is no magic formula, we are all able to achieve greatness.

Passionis Sports understand this, and we are worried that the world of sports and players with great capabilities are suffering because of this problem. So we are preparing a unique leadership tool, tailor made for teams. To help them create the right environment for leadership, growth and motivation. Stay tuned as we unveil more details of this revolutionary tool to guide teams and players into a more exciting era in the world of sports.

..Of Stadiums, Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Part I

We love going to the stadium, but how many times do we face challenges such as parking our car, getting to the stadium, entering the stadium, knowing where your seat is, making long lines and not being completely satisfied with the experience?

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Stadium Business Summit here in Madrid. The Stadium Business Summit is an annual conference where experts from the sports & entertainment industries come together to discuss different topics from the passionate world of sports! This particular conference was focused on the construction & design of stadiums, as Mr. Ian Nuttall founder of the conference mentioned, “there is only one shot to get the stadium right, and fixing mistakes can be costly”. This is most certainly true and usually the ones who suffer from such mistakes are fans, the experience is damaged and the whole magic of watching your favorite team play can be ruined.

We are now living in a world where technology allows us to do a lot things that we didn’t think possible before and we can observe how others can implement ideas successfully to inspire our own ideas, such was the case when the Tele2 Arena  provided a unique way of designing and constructing more than a stadium but a complete experience and entertainment center. This stadium is  available to host not only sporting events but major entertainment events! Mr. Mats Grönlund & Mr. Patrik Tengwell (part of the management team for the stadium) discussed what made so successful their project, during the Summit.

Some of their key insights were taking into account the actual needs of their market to better design the stadium and the overall experience, they decided to involve fans from different ages and analyze what they wanted. This is by far the most important aspect; the stadium is being built for the fans! Not the owner or team, without fans, there can’t be a team! (Or stadium). So it is essential to involve the fans, but how do we do it? How do we actually manage to validate and test our assumptions about our market needs?

To achieve this objective we have to become entrepreneurs (here at Passionis we are experts at doing that, we like to think as fans, we like to engage with a project and create something that we actually want to use or experience!) and follow that spirit and get out of the building and utilize the build-measure-learn loop. The first concept comes from Mr.Steve Blank’s pioneering methods about customer discovery, he basically says that nothing happens inside a company’s building, what you want to learn and discover to guarantee the success of your business is outside your building, by talking with potential customers to discover their needs.

Ok we got it!  We need to talk with fans, but how can we understand their needs and most important sometimes customers don’t know what they want! to create a successful stadium with a great experience?  This is where Lean Start-Up comes into play! In the book he describes how creating prototypes of his product he was able to test them and modify them according to the feedback provided by customers and come up with a great product that  made his business successful; all of the lessons can be applied to any type of business or industry, the sports & entertainment industry is no different!
where the Build-Measure-Learn Loop from Mr. Eric Ries book the

It sounds crazy and someone might be thinking “ we can’t build prototypes of stadiums and tear them down if fans don’t like them”, well actually we can! Using technology we can now create digital versions of what we want to build in the real world.

So for a potential stadium what we can do is:

-       We can create a render of what the stadium might look like and create a web page where fans can explore the entire stadium in an engaging way (we don’t want that boring virtual tour).

-       Then we can create a unique campaign where we engage fans to tell us what they think about the stadium (what they like, what they don’t like, what they would like to see and more!)

-       With all the feedback we get we can iterate the design and incorporate new elements or aspects we didn’t think of in the first place, and create new prototypes and validate our designs, until we achieve something truly unique that satisfies the needs of our market!

 The end result can be a great stadium where the experience for fans is not ruined but instead enhanced, we can WOW our fans and thus improve our customer acquisition rate as well as our customer retention rate, making our stadium a successful sports & entertainment center!

Stay tuned for part II, where we will discuss other aspects of the Tele2 Arena and other ways & ideas to successfully use entrepreneurial skills in the world of sports!

Welcome to our PASSION

-πάθος 
(Páthos) 

- Passionis

These are the greek & latin words for passion. The world of sports embodies and transcends the meaning of these two terms. There is no other place where supporters, athletes and teams live day to day with so much intensity and excitement all for the love of a particular sport. 

At  Passionis we understand this enormous passion because we have it deep in ourselves as well, it is our main objective to serve as an essential teammate in the sports industry. We want to enhance the experience not just for teams, but for players and fans as well.  We want to help you get the most out of this engaging world. At Passionis we will cover a wide arrange of topics such as players: rights, transfers and career management. For teams/sports brands: daily operations, revenues, marketing, optimization tools for day to day tasks, logistics simplification, assessment of potential players, staff selection, motivation and leadership; for fans: engagement, enhancing the sports experience, game-day experience, interaction with the team and more! 

Leveraging technology, design, simplicity and passion we want to provide creative solutions that will make our love for sports even bigger.

For teams, players and fans…This is Passion!