Abstract
Sport Entrepreneurship and Innovation addresses issues that are often avoided in academic interdisciplinary research, especially what lessons a sport context may provide for other fields of business. In striving to renew theoretical understandings in their fields, critical management scholars have recently utilised alternative contexts, such as art organisations, theatre, dance and orchestras. Regardless of certain forerunners, interdisciplinary studies that utilise lively sport contexts still seem to be undervalued.
This edited book consists of 15 chapters. The chapters’ themes cover a wide range of areas in both entrepreneurship and management studies. Throughout the book, sport is used as a vehicle either for social impact or for marketing purposes rather than as a metaphor for more general social phenomena in managing divergent organisations. Similarly, the chapters highlight amateur/non-profit/communal sport contexts rather than professional sport contexts.
In their introduction, Ratten and Ferreira lay the groundwork for the chapters that follow by defining the book’s core concepts and theories. However, although various notions of innovation are clarified and discussed in sport and other contexts, entrepreneurship is not considered adequately. After reading all 250 pages, I still lack a clear picture of where the authors stand on ‘entrepreneurship’; therefore, I must assume that this may have been intended as self-evident throughout the chapters.
In the prevailing trends of commercialisation and professionalisation, Winand and Hoeber remind us of the importance of volunteering in sport business. They focus on the innovation potential in the challenging context of non-profit sport organisations. In the following chapter, Jiménez-Naranjo et al. discuss the socio-economic impact that sporting events may have on local tourism. They construct a model for managerial decision-making purposes and test its validity. In turn, Tjønndal addresses her concern for social exclusion from sport participation and its resultant problems. Through the fascinating context of a local skateboarding club, she illustrates the potential impact that innovative thinking could have on gender-based social inclusion.
Sousa and Madeira aim at problematising how standardised quality procedures may support innovation activities in municipal sport firms. In her first individual contribution for this outlet, Ratten emphasises the status quo of sport leadership literature and proposes thoroughly considered future avenues to which academic scholars could contribute. Specifically, Ratten participates in discussions about leadership lessons that might be transferable from sports to business contexts. Instead of focusing on specific leadership perspectives in sports, she manages to discuss all aspects of management, governance and business marketing alongside leadership issues in a broad manner. In line with the previous chapter’s methodology, Vieira and Ferreira conduct a literature review while exploring the use of the blue ocean strategy as a theoretical framework in academic research.
Parra Camacho et al. declare that interest in the social impacts of sports events is often overshadowed by their economic impacts. By exploring earlier readings in the academic literature, they present a wide variety of both positive and negative social consequences of hosting sports events, as perceived by locals. Okayasu and Morais continue the theme of the social impact of sports by focusing on community development with the assistance of sports activities, particularly rafting and other outdoor sports. The chapter provides an example of entrepreneurial sports activities that are promoted in Japan to support inbound tourism and to strengthen the status of foreign entrepreneurs in Japan. In turn, the chapter by Arraya explicitly touches upon entrepreneurship literature by considering contextually adapted and internally coherent strategic lines of ‘where to play’ and ‘how to win’.
In her second individual contribution, Ratten joins the discussion about what role innovations play in sport policy, how they occur in sport entrepreneurial ecosystems, even across national boundaries, and their impacts on other governmental policies. When Ratten suggests that future research should explore the role of innovation in sport development, McLoughlin and Dawson immediately respond positively. In their study, material and social manifestations of sport practices are not bounded entities but rather are intertwined. Their chapter emphasises socio-material analyses of technical innovations, for example, ‘the hawk eye’, which were designed for reducing errors in human decision-making.
In their chapter, Miragaia and Ferreira promote the importance of customer analysis in sport organisations by exploring motive profiles of athletes as well as their coaches’ awareness of these respective motives. Koronios, Psiloutsikou and Kriemadis continue the motivation theme by examining which factors invite recreational marathoners to embark on rigid training routines. Finally, Ratten and Ferreira summarise the sport entrepreneurship literature and propose future agendas, for example, they encourage considering whether competitive athleticism prepares one for entrepreneurship.
For sports practitioners, this book provides potential insights about what new content to consider in their search for excellence. Respectively, students of sport management may find interesting topics to study further while writing their theses and developing their skills in sport management professions. However, for academics, there appear to be limitations, and the scientific quality seems to vary between the chapters. The chapters throughout this book should have been based on well-defined concepts and more rigorous methodological solutions. In addition, they should have more clearly discussed their reasoning and contributions to serve scholars across all fields. However, while the academic literature has neither recognised nor utilised the full potential of sport for other fields of business, this book manages to provide stimulating perspectives on the disciplines of entrepreneurship, organisation and management studies. My favourite example of those works is McLoughlin and Dawson’s chapter, in which the socio-material lens, when illustrated through the sports context, provides an inspiring, innovative and burning approach to entrepreneurial research philosophy.
In sum, I see this book as a refreshing piece of writing that provides thought-provoking insights, especially for sport management practitioners, students and all sport literature fans.