Throughout its 120-year history, Bara has been a symbol of pride for Spain, Catalonia and the Catalan

Throughout its 120-year history, Barça has been a symbol of pride for Spain, Catalonia and the Catalan people. Its on-field success and star players have captured over 340 million fans worldwide who follow the club on social media. A behemoth of the sports world, Barça was valued at €3.72 billion on revenues of €840.8 million, making it the most valuable football club in 2019. It regularly featured among the world’s top ten most valuable sports brands. It had over 1,450 official supporters clubs globally, 50 training academies in 49 countries, commercial offices in the USA and China with 39 sponsors and 19 official partners from around the world.

However, huge investments in football clubs from the USA, Arabian Gulf, Russia and beyond had precipitated a new era of competition. New media technologies, sponsorship networks, and an increasingly global fan base were changing football and sport more broadly. Innovations in player tracking, coaching technology, injury prevention and sports science gave early adopters an advantage.

Barça responded with the Barça Innovation Hub

(BIH), a first-of-its-kind sports laboratory seeking to define the future of sport through global open innovation, launched in 2017. It was the brainchild of the Barça President and his Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Javier Sobrino, with three interlinked goals:

● To push the boundaries of cutting-edge sports industry knowledge

● Increase the visibility and impact of the Barça brand

● Develop new revenue streams.

With more than 2,000 athletes from five professional sports training at the club every day, 120 teams playing every weekend, the largest stadium in Europe and 3.5 million visitors per year, the BIH was gatekeeper of a data goldmine centred on athletic performance, fan engagement and smart facilities. Leveraging the club’s position at the centre of a global ecosystem, the BIH worked with partners worldwide on R&D, innovation and knowledge sharing, giving life to Barça’s motto, ‘More than a club’. It partnered with universities, research centres, sports entities, sponsors, brands, investors, startups, athletes and fans. Barça Universitas, Barça’s digital learning platform, organized conferences and academic programmes, and brought together 3,000 students from 65 countries in 2018.

It was assessed on several key performance indicators (KPIs), including the number of projects that the club implemented, consumers’ associations between Barça and innovation, and the extent to which the BIH generated new financial resources.

To achieve these goals, the BIH used Barça’s position within a vibrant ecosystem of sports-focused businesses to identify and capitalise on new opportunities.

Open innovation was grounded in a belief that organizations should engage with external partners to develop innovations that they could neither develop internally nor acquire through a merger or acquisition. Throughout the club, all activities focused on improving the team or building its financial firepower to compete on player transfers and wages.

To meet the BIH’s global ambitions, Barça identified seven locations for consideration: US, China, Tel Aviv, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Latin America.

Questions:
1 Did the club have access to the innovation that would yield the disruptive technologies and processes that would define the future?
2 Where, amidst the world’s innovation clusters, should the BIH focus its resources and attention?
3 Where should the BIH look for inspiration to help Barça navigate the future?
4 How should it integrate and prioritise foreign ideas within an organization rooted in tradition, where trophies were the only real measure of success for its supporters?
5 How could global open innovation sustain its current on-field excellence and lay the foundation for future success?