With a great deal of patience, long-term commitment, and a persistent character, Center Director Martin Carlsson-Wall created and realized an M.Sc. elective course, Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports, that gathered 68 students from 19 universities and 16 different countries. During the autumn of 2022, the course will run in its second edition. 

The jury’s motivation for awarding Carlsson-Wall was as follows:

“Martin Carlsson-Wall was the director of the newly developed and highly appreciated MSc elective course on Investments and Value Creation in Global Sports, that was offered to SSE’s international networks. The course was especially designed for digital delivery and attracted students from 19 schools in 16 countries. The course combined content delivered by SSE faculty with global thought leaders as guest lecturers, which was enabled by the digital format. But above and beyond the content of the course, the course extended the classroom for those students physically present in Stockholm, using study trips and sports events.” 

Elaborating on the course format, Carlsson-Wall says:

“An important part of the course was to experiment with physical experiences for the participating SSE students in Stockholm. We started with a kick-off at Berns hosted by Citi (to test a new way of interacting with corporate partners), we watched both football and ice hockey games and we played padel together with one of the best SportTech companies in Sweden. The ambition with this was to integrate SSE’s educational mission FREE both digitally and physically in the course. The magic moments are indeed created when you combine digital and physical elements. Digitalization makes it possible to access global thought leaders, and physical events outside of SSE make networking and confidence-building possible.” 

The sports elective included, for instance, guest lectures by Dan Singer, Partner and Leader of the Global Sports & Gaming Practice at the consulting company McKinsey on the Global Sports Market, David Dellea, Partner and Head of Sports Business at PwC on Gaming and e-sport for international federations, as well as Jasmine Robinson, Partner at Causeway Media Partners on Investing in Sports - An American Growth Equity Perspective. 

On receiving the award, Carlsson-Wall says:

“I am very thankful for achieving this award. My ambition is to combine the research frontier with the practitioner frontier so that the classroom becomes a knowledge lab.”