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.
Fifty-plus in. Three out. That gap is the program.
Every submission was scored against the same rubric and voted on by the same committee. Three cleared it.
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.
Six projects, 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.
Unconscious bias in soccer talent evaluation
Reducing human bias in scouting practice, studied against real evaluation data.
Psychological resilience of NBA players and draft prospects
Understanding performance resilience in draft prospects and current players.
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.
Season one, measured.
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.
Streams prevent portfolio collapse
Separating basic, applied and experimental work kept the program balanced between long-term learning and near-term execution.
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.