Community of practice on innovation

Its mission is to enable sports organisations to implement useful solutions, not just to promote innovation.

The community will adopt a bottom-up approach: it will identify the specific needs in the field of sport in the EU, particularly at grassroots level, and it will highlight innovative methodologies and digital solutions to satisfy those needs.

Priorities: focus on AI

The community identified artificial intelligence (AI) as the most urgent and transformative topic. The community will focus on AI literacy and the development of skills required to implement AI-based solutions.

It will focus on coaches, volunteers, and administrators and provide them with the skills to use AI effectively and ethically.

Our capacity building events and our publications will aim to help practitioners with varying degrees of AI adoption capacity to feel confident and capable in a digital environment, and ensure no one is left behind by new technology.

Latest activities

AI literacy: Training sport organisations for the digital future (7 May 2026)

The capacity building explored how sport organisations can build practical AI literacy and start using AI tools in a realistic, responsible way. Speakers showed that AI can already support everyday tasks such as content creation, administration, communication, data analysis, athlete monitoring and facility management.

A central takeaway was that organisations do not need to start with complex systems. Small, low-risk use cases and affordable tools can already save time and improve workflows, especially when combined with good digital foundations and basic staff training. Several examples highlighted how AI can help clubs and federations deliver multilingual support, generate reports, personalise training insights and manage operations more efficiently.

The discussions also underlined that responsible use is essential. Data quality, privacy, consent and GDPR compliance must be considered from the start, particularly when handling personal or sensitive information. Overall, the event showed that AI in sport should be approached as a practical support tool: start small, learn by doing, collaborate with others and scale what works.

Previous activities

• Innovations in self-organised sport in public spaces. This webinar explored the rapid growth of informal, tech-enabled activity in parks and other public spaces. Contributors stressed the importance of codesign with users, low barrier access, and acceptance that people will creatively repurpose urban environments.

• Artificial intelligence for the grassroots sport sector. The webinar presented some best practices on 1) how sport clubs can become better at using AI-based technologies, 2) how AI-based technologies can help streamline actions and tasks in sport clubs and 3) how training programmes for coaches and staff can help the sport sector perform better.

• AI masterclass for grassroots sport. A panel discussion at the 2025 SHARE 2.0 annual conference focused on the opportunities and challenges that AI-based technologies offer to sport clubs.The panel presented some real-life examples of how grassroots sport clubs and realities are taking advantage of AI opportunities. Watch the recording

Ideas papers

The community has released three ideas papers.

• The ideas paper on digitalisation as a source of competitiveness in the sport sector identifies common challenges faced by both grassroots and professional organisations and proposes strategies to address these issues.

• The ideas paper on creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem for sport sector start- and scale-ups outlines the key barriers these enterprises face. It highlights the need to enhance education, improve access to funding, and tackle market fragmentation to support their growth and success.

• The ideas paper on artificial intelligence in the sport sector is addressed to all sport stakeholders who are curious about what artificial intelligence technologies can do.

Join now!

Fill in the call for expression of interest to join our communities. 

Members can also access all recordings of past capacity building actions in the initiative's Teams group.