..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!