Each academic course, Euroleague Basketball launches a challenge for La Salle’s Management and Business students. New this year, 350 students will gather in 70 mixed IT Engineering and Business Studies teams to work in a design sprint over 8 weeks on some of Euroleague Basketball key strategic tech challenges. This initiative aims to encourage students to think outside the box and come up with new innovative and technological solutions while working in cross-disciplinary teams.
Projects like these are part of La Salle’s DNA. The University promotes an interdisciplinary approach with transversal, interrelated areas of specialization to assist in the transfer of knowledge and technology. Thus, students from different areas of expertise can work together in cross-disciplinary challenges where they develop videogames, architectural proposals, etc.
Euroleague Basketball is one of the top-notch companies that work together with La Salle-URL students to solve industry challenges, along with Manchester City, Asics, or SEAT. Previous editions include other initiatives like the Start-Up Tech Challenge or the Fan XP Innovation Challenge. Euroleague is devoted to running the top European competitions of professional basketball clubs and organizes the continent’s two premier men’s basketball competitions: the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague and the 7DAYS EuroCup.
The challenge
This year’s challenge has been split into three main action areas. The first one aims to increase user-generated content. Students will have to come up with innovative campaigns to connect with fans through making them content creators.
According to Alex Ferrer Kristjansson, Senior Director of Marketing and Communication of Euroleague Basketball, the company uses the most common channels to upload the content but what they really lack is user engagement. People go to the arena or watch the game at home so the next logical step would be to turn them into content creators. Therefore, their first goal is to stimulate creativity among their followers.
The second one is related to the experience in the arena. This includes the design of an innovative fan experience that excites fans and enables Euroleague and its club to capture data. People in Europe attend games to support their team while in the US they go for entertainment. Thus, arenas have become a hybrid space where fans can enjoy the services of a cinema, a shopping mall, and even a swimming pool. So, they aim to find new initiatives that can improve the experience of European fans while attending the arenas.
The last one refers to the Live Game Broadcast and how fans consume the games. Experience tells that is very complicated to maintain the spectator’s attention for the entire game. For that, the challenge for the students will be to think about how to improve the remote experience during the game itself and propose alternative content to be consumed using a second screen in one of the multiple devices available today.
How students will overcome the challenge
La Salle-URL students have been split into 70 mixed IT Engineering and Business Studies to work in different prototypes that will be presented in front of the teacher’s board. This process will last 8 weeks and will include different phases:
- Group dynamics
- Online team-building
- Euroleague presentation
- Mentoring
- Final deadline
The final presentation will be held on April, 14 and will consist of a prototype, mock-up, storyboard of a customer journey, the first ideas of an app… Anything the students might find appropriate to showcase the solutions found for each challenge. Top 10 teams will present their project to a board of executives and experts from Euroleague Basketball.