Insights from sport and health researchers at SDU

Figure 7: Insights into the thinking of researchers and the collaborations they have and would like to develop in future research projects

Football organisations also ask for support to identify sustainable, valid, and value giving product innovation. Especially in the data-driven digital innovation, it may be difficult to analyse and evaluate and with this to recommend specific products for the clubs’ daily activities. As such, the organisations propose:

“The innovation centre's role can also be to validate and sort technologies so that we know more about what we need to work on, and subsequently connect them with the right startups or users/clubs.” The football organisations, the research institutions and the municipalities find it inspiring and giving to get closer to the sports industry and connect more closely with the football startups – and also to have stronger global outreach. A huge potential is also seen from football, research and public organisations collaborating with students to initiate pilots of project ideas. For that, matchmaking is needed, and could be organised by the innovation centre.

Insights from sport and health researchers at SDU

Based on the workshop with the SDU researchers, Figure 7 presents the key insight from the stakeholder group. The model was further developed at the sixth workshop for further discussion and validation of the model and ways of collaboration. The illustration aims to catch the outreach collaborative power of many existing research projects and the dependency on grants for establishing and running research projects, while also illustrating the desire to work across disciplines and reach out to other research units.

During the workshop with researchers, we found that just about all of them in their research project work together with external partners as described in 2.3, although some more than others. We also found that research projects between startups, research institutions and NGOs were rarely taking place, and to a very small extent with research funding from the non-profit common good foundations. Examples of clubs seeking funding together with universities for CSR-like projects or for different kinds of follow-up research were not seen either. Technology has also been identified to be a football research driver among the researchers participating in the workshop. We also see several research projects working closely together with the football organisations, especially SHS (Sports & Health Sciences) has research projects with many different partners across the club continuum and in collaboration with NGO and with public institutions such as schools. The opportunity is in future to have a more profound cross-disciplinary research profile in fields that call for heavier impact by applying a cross-organisational and cross-disciplinary research approach. The researchers proposed:

Startups

Sharing knowledge Collecting data

Researchers students

Projectideation Collaboration Player, Trainer & Clubs

Development & research => new knowledge Performance – Inj uri e s – Mental health – Technology – Educati on – Hea lth – Civil society – Impact– citizenvalue – health Impactbased research

Researchersstudents

Researchersstudents Researcher collaboration NGOs

Cross-disciplinary research projects CSR

Funds

“An interdisciplinary practice lab would be amazing! We should take a 360-degree