Content area
Full Text
Sports innovation is an emerging research area linking sport to innovation management and practice. Innovation in sport can be seen in new technologies, equipment and clothing, in new strategies and training, in new consumer products and services, in new media and formats, and in the development of new sports. Although the role of sports innovation is widely recognized in global business and media, less attention has centered on it from an academic approach. This special section seeks to deepen our understanding of sports innovation with six papers that discuss issues associated with this emerging theme in innovation management.
Keywords: sport management; innovation management; innovation
Introduction
Sport is an increasing area of interest to innovation management researchers due to the growth of the sports industry and its impact on other sectors of the economy (Ratten & Ferreira, 2016). Yet there remains a lack of conceptual and applied analytical understanding of this research area. This special section collects different approaches to the study of sport innovation that explore different relationships between the sometimes disparate sports and innovation management literatures. Recently there has been a call for sport management research to adopt a more interdisciplinary and innovation-based approach due to the ideas that have emerged from the industry (Doherty, 2013; Funk, Lock, Karg, & Pritchard, 2016). Sport research can benefit from more attention to the work of innovation scholars in order to create a new sub-discipline of innovation management research.
In the past few decades, many sports have moved from being mostly organized by amateurs to having a business management approach. Yet there are nevertheless reasons to expect sports to retain distinct management approaches: namely, due to sport's emotional experience, its high level of social interaction, uncertain outcomes and engagement of consumers (Baker, McDonald, & Funk, 2016; Smith & Stewart, 2010). This community-based amateur ethos of many sports and the global-market based for-profit basis of other sports also means that innovation processes work differently in different sports. Sport innovations are constantly evolving in terms of how they are used, particularly in the domain of sports media and culture due to the outsized effect of sport on global business promotions and sport's influence on economic development (Abeza, O'Reilly, Seguin, & Nzindukiyimana, 2015; Ratten, 2011).
Scholarship about sport innovation...