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Photo by: BRIAN DAVIDSON
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Define innovation: The combination of new ideas and creativity with an application to solve real-world problems.
What’s the innovation you’re most proud of? I was responsible for the design of a new health network architecture with Cerner which will launch in five to 10 years.
What’s the future of your industry? We are on the cusp of what I call Sports 2.0 where information will be gathered, organized and integrated, and then pushed out to drive integration.
What inspires you? Evolution and adoption of technology at the consumer level is a great inspiration for me.
Asim Pasha
Chief Information Officer and Chief Architect
Sporting Kansas City
Sporting Kansas City’s $200 million Livestrong Sporting Park isn’t like other sports facilities. Like innovative thinkers themselves, you could say it’s just wired differently.
The stadium, which opened to rave reviews in June, uses a high-density wireless network to provide fans with lightning-fast Internet service throughout the facility, as well as Cisco’s StadiumVision customized video content and Google-designed broadband software to run the network.
Spearheading it all was Asim Pasha, Sporting KC’s chief information officer and chief architect. His goal was simple: to engage — and please — the fan.
The team is still figuring out ways to accomplish that using the stadium’s state-of-the-art technology. Pasha said Sporting KC will offer games, sales, highlights and surveys for fans via their connected devices. The new stadium’s success has even prompted the team to spin off its own technology company, Sporting Innovations, which offers consulting services on facility technology.
A native of Pakistan, Pasha designed microchips for Intel in the mid-1980s before moving into a tech career that included stops with Citibank, Fidelity and the Kansas City-based Cerner Corp., a health care company founded by Sporting KC owners Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson. Pasha said the lessons he learned while working in health care have guided him with the stadium project.
“I think of the fan like the patient, the individual — they drive all of the demand in our ecosystem,” he said. “My learning from Cerner is to put the fan in the middle of an experience and build a framework around his actions.”
— Fred Dreier
