Sports Innovation & Ideathon Platform for Leagues and Federations

A coach still records gym sessions on paper before someone re-types them into a spreadsheet. Ground staff know an inspection could be finished in half the time. A ticketing team notices the same manual step every renewal cycle. These observations exist, but the only channel for them is a meeting, a WhatsApp message, an email to a manager, or a workshop that runs once a year and produces a spreadsheet of a hundred ideas nobody revisits afterwards. Most never reach anyone who could act on them, and the ones that do arrive as a single unstructured opinion rather than something a reviewer can actually assess: who is affected, how often the problem occurs, and what a first test would look like. A league or federation has it worse. Twelve clubs can independently raise the same scheduling problem and nobody notices it is the same problem twelve times, because nothing connects one club's submission to another's.

A structured intake for problems and ideas from anywhere in the organisation, not only from an innovation team's workshop. An employee describes what they are seeing in plain language; a guided assistant asks who is affected, how often it happens and what the smallest useful test would be, then turns that conversation into a submission carrying the fields a reviewer needs, while the employee stays the named author. Before a new submission is treated as new, it is checked against existing ones for the same underlying problem described differently, and related submissions are linked rather than left to compete for attention. Support for a problem and support for a proposed solution are tracked separately, because agreeing a problem is real is a different signal from liking one person's fix for it. From there a submission moves through a visible review with a small set of outcomes — move to pilot, needs rework, merge with something existing, hold, or decline with a stated reason — and an approved idea becomes a pilot with an owner, a budget, a timeline and a stated success measure, so the organisation can later ask whether the pilot worked rather than whether people liked the idea. It does not replace a project-tracking tool once a pilot is running, and it does not make the investment decision itself; it gives whoever does make that decision a structured, comparable set of submissions to work from instead of a spreadsheet.

The interview is the agent: it turns "our coaches still record gym workouts on paper" into who is affected, how often, and what a first pilot would test, without asking the groundskeeper or coach who raised it to write anything resembling a proposal. The same check runs a similarity pass at the moment of submission, so a reviewer sees three clubs' differently worded submissions about the same inspection problem linked as one underlying issue rather than three separate spreadsheet rows competing for attention. What it does not do is decide what gets built: it structures and connects: a person still reviews, and a person still funds the pilot.

Heads of innovation and IT running an internal ideas pipeline, league and federation administrators who want to see the same problem surfacing across several clubs, and the coaches, ground staff, ticketing and commercial employees whose day-to-day observations are the actual source of the ideas.

A first phase of ten to fourteen weeks: a guided submission form with the assistant-led interview, a similarity check against existing submissions run at the point of entry, separate problem-endorsement and solution-voting, a review queue with the five outcomes and a recorded reason for each, and a status view so a contributor can see where their submission stands. Out of scope for version one: automatic scoring or ranking that replaces a reviewer's judgement, pilot budget and timeline tracking once something is approved, cross-club or cross-federation analytics, and any integration with an existing project-tracking tool — a pilot's day-to-day management stays wherever the organisation already runs pilots.