SF4Sport — kicked off in Oslo

§ 1On 22 April the SF4Sport consortium met in Oslo for the kick-off of an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership. SF4Sport — Strategic Foresight for Sport — is, in plain terms, the first EU-funded alliance with the explicit ambition of redefining how Europe prepares its sport ecosystem for the future, by integrating artificial intelligence, deep tech and foresight into education, training and decision-making. It is more than a project. It is a methodology in becoming.

§ 2The work is organised around four tracks. The first is listening: over the next three years, the consortium will engage one hundred and sixty-plus leaders from clubs, federations, startups, technology companies and academia, to capture the real needs of the sector rather than the imagined ones. The second is anticipation: future scenarios and strategic roadmaps so that organisations can act ahead of disruption, not react after it. The third is education: new AI-powered curricula that will shape the next generation of sport professionals. The fourth is acceleration: international hackathons that turn ideas into prototypes and prototypes into adoption.

§ 3The ambition is to equip the sport industry with the skills, the tools and the foresight needed to navigate disruption — to treat AI not as a technology to adopt, but as a capability to master. By the end of the three years, we want SF4Sport to stand as a reference methodology for any organisation, public or private, asked to think seriously about the future of sport.

§ 4Seventeen partners is a deliberate scale. It is large enough to surface the real disagreements in the sector, and small enough to do something with them. Collective Innovation coordinates the project from Oslo. GSIC powered by Microsoft is among the partners on the day. The other sixteen organisations span the European map and the layers of the ecosystem the project is built to address. Three years is the working horizon. The methodology, if it works, is the legacy.