MLSE had ideas, partners and emerging technology. What it didn't have was a way to tell an interesting idea from a decision-ready one. was the R&D program I co‑founded to fix that. It reserved capital for research, gave everyone one scorecard, and put a committee in place that either funded the work or stopped it. I built the system behind all of it, and led some of the projects myself.
Many in. Few out. That gap is the program.
- Submitted
Ideas came in from across the business, in three streams.
- Scored
Every one was measured against the same rubric.
- Decided
The same committee voted on all of them. Some of mine didn't make it.
- Funded
The few that cleared it went into flight.
Good ideas, no way to choose between them.
MLSE had high-potential ideas, willing partners and real technology opportunities. What early-stage innovation lacked was a system. Without a consistent process, strong concepts were hard to evaluate, hard to fund, and harder still to move into execution with any confidence.
The cost wasn't a missing idea. It was that the organisation couldn't tell which ideas were ready, so the loudest advocate won and the most patient work never started.
Inconsistent early-stage rigour
Ideas entered the pipeline in different formats with different levels of research behind them, which made "interesting" and "decision-ready" impossible to tell apart.
No shared way to prioritise
Teams evaluated opportunities through different lenses. Without a common rubric, prioritisation ran on opinion, urgency, and who advocated hardest.
Innovation lost to short-term delivery
Future-facing work struggled to earn time and resources because immediate ROI was always easier to justify. The result was underpowered discovery and shallow validation.
Fund the runway, then hold it accountable.
Three pillars, and the same bargain underneath all of them. Protected capital, in exchange for an explicit decision at the end.
SportsX created protected R&D capital so future-facing work could happen without forcing immediate ROI. In exchange, every project carried clear decision gates and defined outcomes, so the runway produced confident go/no-go calls rather than open-ended exploration.
We standardised how ideas were framed and evaluated. A consistent scorecard and a committee vote made projects comparable across teams and streams, which cut subjective debate and raised the quality of what reached funding.
We favoured prototypes and pilots that generated signal quickly, then tested them in real operational contexts. Every project produced measurable learnings, a recommendation to scale, iterate or stop, and a documented retrospective, so the program's knowledge compounded.
Funded and in flight.
Three streams kept the portfolio honest, and every project entered through one of them. The stream set the expectation before the work started, defining what counted as a result and what it would take to say the project had worked. The basic research studies are not shown here.
The entry experience study
How the live-event experience might begin before a fan reaches the arena.
AR training experience
Augmented reality applied as a tool for basketball training.
The metaverse community experiment
A linked virtual and physical community, tested as one fan experience rather than two.
The NFT physical wearables experiment
Digital ownership attached to something a fan can actually wear.
What changed in how MLSE decided.
A shared intake model and evaluation rubric replaced opinion-driven debate with comparable, evidence-based decisions. Teams spent less time arguing for ideas and more time testing them.
Protected runway changed behaviour. Proposals arrived with clearer hypotheses and explicit decision criteria, low-signal ideas were stopped earlier, and high-potential work moved into execution with confidence.
Runway changes behaviour
When funding is protected, teams invest in stronger research, better prototypes and clearer measurement instead of shortcutting to something shippable.
The scorecard has to apply to you
Some of the projects I led didn't make it through. If the rubric had bent for the people who wrote it, nobody else would have trusted it.
Make the decision explicit
The best proposals defined the decision upfront, stating what we would do if the results came back strong, weak, or inconclusive.
Visibility creates momentum
The annual Innovation Forum made the work real to the wider organisation and created accountability through shared review and a vote.