Future Sport Labs · Making Sport Better
Building the capability
to make sport better.
Victorian sport has no shortage of ideas, reports, events or resources. Future Sport Labs bring evidence, sector leaders, participant voices, specialist expertise and AI together to tackle shared challenges, build practical capability and test solutions in the real world.
- Evidence
- Capability
- Experiment
- Learning
- Improvement
Evidence first. Capability over content. Built to implement.
Why Future Sport Labs?
Victorian sport does not need more
disconnected capability content.
Across the sector, organisations are often facing similar challenges — participant retention, workforce sustainability, digital capability, safe and trusted environments, organisational sustainability and changing community expectations.
Too often, those challenges are investigated and solved independently. Future Sport Labs provide a different model.
See common problems
Name the challenge the sector is repeatedly solving alone.
Convene the right people
A curated cohort, not an open invitation.
Build shared capability
Capability built by doing the work together.
Design practical responses
Real responses to a real, owned challenge.
Test what works
With actual participants, during the Lab.
Spread the learning
Published so the next organisation starts further on.
Who it is for
Victorian sport organisations with a real, owned challenge and the authority to test a practical response.
What participants leave with
Stronger capability, a tested response, evidence of what changed, and learning others can use.
Today
Every organisation starts again
- Organisation → problem → solution
- Organisation → same problem → different solution
- Organisation → same problem → starts again
Future Sport Labs
Solve it once, together
- Evidence → Shared Challenge
- Collective Capability → Test
- Learn → Spread
Solve shared problems together. Reduce the need to start again.
How they fit
Part of the Victorian Sport
Improvement System.
Future Sport Labs are one part of a connected approach to sector improvement.
- State of Sport
- Together More Active
- Future Sport Labs
- Guiding Sport
- Knowledge & Community
- State of Sport
- See what is happening.
- Identify capability priorities.
- Build capability and practical responses.
- Support deeper implementation.
- Share what works.
- Measure again.
Evidence does not sit in a report. It becomes an input to action — and what we learn through action becomes new evidence.
What is a Future Sport Lab?
A structured capability-building experience
around one shared sector challenge.
Each Lab brings together a curated cohort of sport organisations and combines seven ingredients.
Evidence
What do we know?
Lived experience
What are people actually experiencing?
Future Fellows
What specialist expertise can help us see differently?
Peers
What can organisations learn from one another?
Making Sport Better
How do we move systematically from problem to implementation?
AI
Where can technology accelerate thinking, analysis and creation?
Real-world experimentation
What happens when we actually try it?
The Capability Sprint
The Lab is the programme.
The Sprint is the method.
A Capability Sprint is a structured, evidence-led and human-centred experience in which people work on a real challenge, build capability by applying practical methods, develop and test responses, and leave able to implement what they have learned.
- SEE
- LOOK
- IMAGINE & MAKE
- TEST
- LEARN & COMMIT
Participants do not simply attend. They investigate, design, test and implement.
Real challenges
Work on something your organisation actually owns.
Shared capability
Learn by doing alongside other organisations.
Practical change
Test something with real people — not after the Lab, but during it.
Future Fellows
Experts work alongside the cohort.
Future Fellows bring specialist expertise into the work at the moments where it is most useful. They may include researchers, practitioners, designers, technologists, sector leaders and people with lived experience. They work alongside the cohort rather than simply presenting and leaving.
- Provoke
- Coach
- Challenge
- Connect
- Unblock
AI in Future Sport Labs
Human-led. AI-accelerated.
AI is used as a working capability — not as the subject of the Lab. Depending on the challenge, participants may use AI to:
- Analyse evidence
- Surface assumptions
- Explore alternative perspectives
- Generate possibilities
- Stress-test ideas
- Prototype communications
- Support evaluation
But the critical capability remains human judgement: what did we accept, reject or change — and why?
From Lab to sector learning
The Lab ends. The learning doesn't.
- Lab
- Experiment
- Evidence
- Pattern
- Sector Practice
- State of Sport
Future Sport Labs do not automatically produce another suite of resources. VicSport captures what was learned and translates only what is useful. That may become:
- A tested pattern
- Case study
- Template
- AI prompt
- Implementation guide
- Community of Practice discussion
- Future Guiding Sport project
Build less. Learn more. Share what works.
Current Future Sport Lab
Participant Experience
Design sporting experiences people choose to return to.
How might we design sporting experiences that are easier to start, more worth staying for and more natural to contribute to?
Partners
Building sector capability together.
Future Sport Labs can also bring together government, research, industry and specialist partners whose expertise can improve the work. Partners may contribute:
Evidence
Research and analytical capability.
Specialist expertise
Contributed through the Future Fellows network.
Technology
Tools, access and practical support in the room.
Venues and experiences
An environment that raises the quality of the Lab.
Evaluation capability
Stronger measurement of what actually changed.
Support for live experiments
Backing for one or more 90-day tests.
Partners contribute to the work. They do not buy access to the room.
Help make Victorian sport better.
Explore the current Future Sport Lab, contribute expertise, or follow the learning as it develops.