“Huware will be the first Official Innovation Partner of Juventus Forward, the Club’s project dedicated to innovation”. This is how the Bianconeri club’s press release begins on its official website, with which it announces the start of a new project for the Old Lady. Below is the full note:
“Juventus and Huware have launched the first partnership in the field of innovation in the Italian top flight, with the aim of promoting the co-creation and development of new technological solutions to accelerate digital innovation in sports, and have unveiled this exciting collaboration at the Google Cloud Summit in Milan.
Thanks to this agreement, Juventus Forward – the Club’s innovation laboratory – will collaborate with Huware, a cloud consultancy company, to digitally innovate and exploit the potential of Artificial Intelligence in different areas, from performance to fan engagement. Huware and Juventus together aim to accelerate change by adopting a concrete approach, relying on real cases to test new solutions and expand the boundaries of the use of specific Artificial Intelligence technologies in sport, from performance to business.
The partnership between Juventus and Huware will explore various ways in which Artificial Intelligence can be applied in the world of football today. Machine Learning for training and performance analysis, Computer Vision, borrowed from agriculture, to identify defects and predict the evolution of the turf, generative AI for content creation, are just some of the areas that will be explored. The objective is to have a 360° impact on the Club’s functions, with the aim of encouraging the adoption not only of new technological solutions, but also of introducing an innovative mentality which, with a new approach, pushes its gaze towards the future and the opportunities it can offer.
Francesco Calvo, Managing Director Revenue & Football Development Juventus Football Club, said: «Innovation has always been a driving force in the history of Juventus. This is why the creation of a department dedicated to it was a spontaneous and natural decision. Innovation is the tool to translate ideas into value, and we are particularly proud today to be able to announce the first partnership in this field, which demonstrates how the club is always looking to the future». Carolina Chiappero, Innovation Manager of Juventus, added: «The path undertaken in recent years has shown us how innovation can play an important role in changing the rules of the game: today we take to the field with Huware to announce the first partnership for innovation in the top flight of Italian football, with the aim of developing and testing concrete use cases based on artificial intelligence».
WHAT IS JUVENTUS FORWARD
Juventus Forward is the Club’s most recent innovation program. It is a co-creation space that encourages internal collaboration and integration with the external innovation ecosystem (Institutions, Start-ups, Accelerators). Forward, a fusion between corporate and sporting soul, has the role of facilitator, with the aim of promoting the conditions necessary to generate innovation. As the first sports partner of an accelerator in SportTech, winner of the 2023 Innovation of the Year award awarded by the Social Football Summit, organizer of ‘Calls for Ideas’ aimed at students, active in Venture Clienting and an increasingly active participant in the innovation network, the project is divided into three objectives: translating ideas into value (revenues and performance), brand positioning and introduction of a culture of innovation, because innovation is not only represented by technological solutions, ideas or methods, but also by the process to discover new ways of doing things”.