“Fail fast to learn fast”: integrating lean startup thinking to manage innovations in performance support workflows

Professional sport organisations continuously innovate to gain a competitive advantage, as it enables leveraging cutting-edge technology, advanced research and data-informed strategies to business management. Practitioners in those environments are frequently exposed to early inventions and are responsible for operationalising them as innovations in performance support workflows. Accordingly, this article highlights the importance of adopting a “fail fast to learn fast” mindset when managing sports innovation and outlines a process to operationalise it based on the entrepreneurial lean startup framework. When adopting this philosophy, it is vital to initially define clear value hypotheses, which can trigger iterative build-measure-learn cycles from the lean startup. This allows systematic evaluation of the innovation potential of an invention. Specifically, by developing a minimum viable product (MVP) of the invention and measuring its potential to achieve the value propositions that were defined initially. If sufficient value is created, the invention transforms as an innovation and the lifecycle continues to the next stages (i.e. diffusion). If not, the process is repeated by creating a new MVP by swiftly pivoting to a fresh build-measure-learn cycle. This leads to validated learning about the invention through active experimentation before investing significant time and resources on an innovation lifecycle.