“Already since the beginning of SportInnovator, RevelX has been our partner in the upscaling and professionalisation of our network of Sports Innovation Centers. They have played a crucial role in measuring and improving the quality of the national sport innovation ecosystem and their innovation processes.”
Merit Clocquet & Eric van der Veen
Sportinnovator
SportInnovator is a network organisation of individual Sports Innovation Centers, initiated and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Health & Sports and the Dutch National Olympic Committee. The organisation contributes to the vitality and performance of recreational, competitive and professional sporters via ideation, development and upscaling of sports related innovations. The network consists of 19 certified partner centers supported by a bureau that takes care of various policy making, managerial and supportive tasks.
As Sportinnovator is partly funded by the Government and an increasing amount of people is working in the network, the desire to establish a clear picture on the social merit of innovations in sports arose. Stakeholders agreed that it became more and more important to know what the social return on impact of all the innovative work done by the network was. But, measuring social returns on innovation is not a trivial thing.
RevelX and SportInnovator adopted the Social Profit Model, developed by TIAS Business School and Whise (consultancy specialised in social profit). The social profit model helps organisations to find clear causal relationships between an intervention (for example an innovation, a project, etc) and the impact of that intervention on various stakeholder groups. In multiple work sessions with the innovation centers we found various ways to link innovations to the social impact these innovations could generate.
The result was that SportInnovator became much better at explaining its social impact to various stakeholders. On top of that, SportInnovator could make better decisions on which innovation project proposals to support and which not, based on clear social impact criteria.
