Sunday, November 23, 2014

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! 






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