What does Innovation mean to Active London speakers

London Sport were proud to confirm nearly 30 speakers for our Active London conference last week who will cover innovation in the ways we work from a variety of different prospectives.

The morning session of Active London will conclude with a four-strong panel discussion on local, borough-level innovation to inform and inspire the 200-plus delegates expected on 10 September.

With just two weeks left to purchase your Active London ticket, we caught up with the panel to get their thoughts on what innovation means to them and how it is plays out in their daily lives.

The panel will be chaired by co-founder of Two Circles Matt Rogan. His company is a data-driven sports marketing agency servicing over 100 clients including the NFL, Premier League and UEFA.

He said: “Two Circles was founded under the premise that sports organisations needed to harness the previously unutilised power of data to drive growth in every area.

“This required innovation in both thinking, encouraging sports organisations to use data insight to drive every area of decision-making, and technology, putting in the tools required to enable that to happen.

“Every successful sports organisation is now data-driven in the commercial decisions it makes. However, changing habits of sports fans and media fragmentation mean that they are facing new challenges that can determine their long-term commercial success.

“Our innovation comes, daily, in using data insight in new and different ways to help them navigate the changing commercial landscape, and using more powerful analytical tools and technology, such as machine-learning, to enable that to happen.”

Our first panellist is Karen Creavin, Chief Executive of The Active Wellbeing Society, a community benefit society that delivers the wellbeing services on behalf of Birmingham City Council.

She said: “We know that to tackle the big issues that have led to systemic inequality we are going to have to do things differently. In order to have a fair and equal society, we need to behave differently.

“We innovate by working with communities rather than 'doing to'. We seek to identify the barriers to behaviour change and then work with communities to co-create solutions or mitigations to those barriers. 

“Sport and physical activity has a key role in tackling much wider social issues. We need to innovate to ensure we reach all the people we need to if we are to truly benefit from the transformative power of sport.”

Read more: What does Active London theme, Innovation, mean to London Sport staff. 

Matt and Karen will be joined by Eloise Moller who is a Sport & Health Programme Manager at  The Single Homeless Project – a charity which won a London Sport Award earlier this year.

She said: “Sport provides positive experiences and outcomes for people with complex bio-psycho-social needs including both direct physical and mental health benefit.

“Client engagement is one of the principle challenges in all homelessness work. It requires positive processes of thinking and innovation (trying things out) to address it.

“Also, the demographic, geography and dynamics of chronic homelessness and rough sleeping are subject to change and finding solutions to this is necessary.

"The nature of funding in the field, for example, can be short-term, often requiring ‘new’ innovation to secure it.”

Completing the panel is Charlotte Boenigk, chairman and founder of Free Your Instinct – an innovative charity that uses parkour to assist with mental health and wellbeing.

She said: “Innovation played a large part in the development of Free Your Instinct. At the time it was the only organisation in the UK to offer parkour for mental health.

“At the moment, Free Your Instincts data is processed using very basic data processing methods.

“Innovation will play a strong part in ensuring data can be improved without affecting the quality of service to the participants, which will include emerging technology such as apps to ensure mobile, yet secure management.”

Active London tickets are on sale until 5pm on Friday 6 September, click here to buy yours.