04 November 2019

Dr Machar Reid, Head of Innovation at Tennis Australia, delivered a thought-provoking session at the AIS Sports Technology and Applied Research Symposium (STARS) about using performance related data for more than improving an athlete’s game.

Tennis Australia’s remit is to not only develop the next wave of internationally competitive Australian tennis players, but to innovate the way tennis is consumed by its fans.

As Head of Innovation Dr Reid finds himself at the intersection of these two imperatives. One of the key messages he delivered at STARS is that no one person should be responsible for innovation in an organisation.

“If organisations want to survive and thrive, innovation needs to be the responsibility of everyone,” says Reid.

Sport has its own particular challenges with the competition for participants and eyeballs at an historical high. Never has the notion, ‘innovate or die’, been so critical in the sporting landscape. Reid embraces this challenge, partly through the innovative use of data, made available through emerging technologies.

Employing its first data scientist in 2011, Tennis Australia has grown the capability beyond data driven athlete benchmarks, to a suite of digital products that in Reid’s words, ‘tell better tennis stories’ to engage fans.

In partnership with Victoria University, Tennis Australia established a start-up called the Game Insight Group (GIG) to challenge the status quo, change the way tennis is consumed and tell better tennis stories. Reid’s session at STARS highlighted a range of innovative ways that a sport can take its performance content and turn it into sophisticated ways to engage an increasingly digitally literate fan base.

While many of the products were impressive, Reid did not shy away from the failures too.

“If you’re not failing, you’re leaving some innovation on the table,” says Reid. “The key is to fail quickly, park any baggage and bias, learn and move onto what’s next.”