Sport Entrepreneurship

Sport entrepreneurship is one of the newer forms of entrepreneurship but is rapidly gaining popularity due to its ability to merge theory with practice. The main difference between sport entrepreneurship and other forms of entrepreneurship is the incorporation of an interdisciplinary perspective. This means unlike other forms of entrepreneurship that are either focused on financial or nonfinancial aspects, sport entrepreneurship offers a unique hybrid conceptualization of entrepreneurship that acknowledges the complexity of the global economic environment. This chapter addresses the need for more research on sport entrepreneurship to take a holistic approach to understanding its meaning and application in business studies.

Within entrepreneurship literature, the conventional approaches inspired by Schumpeter's “creative destruction” have largely emphasized the role of human cognitive processes to come up with new business ideas. In contemporary studies, however, there is a recent research stream wherein creativity is aestheticized. As a research line of the aesthetic approach, there is an increasing interest for playfulness and other signals of enjoyment that can also stimulate the entrepreneur's creative acts.

This chapter is a reflexion about the liberating and creative role of play in the context of sport entrepreneurship, particularly, in the fitness industry. It aspires to give to the recent development of the sport entrepreneurship field a novel twist by relating it to a theology of play. Drawing on the work of one of the most influential twentieth-century theologians who has approached play theology, Hugo Rahner, we present how his theological approach may be used to widen our understanding of sport entrepreneurship. This theological perspective allows us to develop alternative thoughts based on concepts that transcend the typical rationalist business approach and its instrumental language.

This chapter contributes to the general debate in entrepreneurship studies about the role of leadership effects. While there has been an abundance of research into the technology industry in terms of leadership and entrepreneurship, less is known about the sport industry. The human capital of sport entrepreneurs is unique due to contextual factors and needs to be studied in more depth. This chapter aims at contributing theoretically to sport entrepreneurship research by specifically focusing on leadership traits and value creation. This means acknowledging that much of the value in sport derives from the cocreation process that is made possible by good leaders. The role of project management in terms of design thinking for entrepreneurial value creation is stated. In addition, suggestions for moving the sport entrepreneurship field forward by taking a leadership approach is stated.

The FIFA Museum in Zurich is a division of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and has been opened in 2016 with the aspiration to become one of the key attractions, both in Zurich as well as in the association football context. As with many tourist attractions, staying on top of the game is a challenge. Unlike other museums, the FIFA Museum took an open innovation approach in developing their concept, especially for those parts that deal with visitor interactions. With the goal of being not only a football museum, but also an attractive and leading event location in Switzerland, event ideas were collected using a crowdsourcing approach, managed through a platform run by ATIZO. Through this community, the museum could design attractive event concepts, succeeded to increase visitor engagement and built a loyal base of innovators and future guests. This chapter describes the crowdsourcing methodology applied by the FIFA Museum, critically examines the process, advantages, and disadvantages of the methodology chosen, and concludes by giving recommendations for similar cases. The particular focus lies on the application of the crowdsourcing method in areas where a strong fan community can be involved in the development process, such as, e.g., in the association football context.

Sport entrepreneurial ecosystems are part of the international business environment and help to determine the competitiveness of a place. While the origins of entrepreneurial ecosystems derive from the economic geography field, increasingly international business theories are being used as a way to engage with the cultural and societal context. This means it is important for scholars to take an interdisciplinary perspective on how to define and conceptualize an ecosystem from an entrepreneurial point of view. This chapter reviews the current body of literature on sport entrepreneurial ecosystems and extends it to a more international business perspective by focusing on knowledge spillovers. This will enable sport managers and practitioners to utilize entrepreneurial ecosystems as a way to foster their internationalization efforts.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems provide a comprehensive way to understand the complexity of sport entrepreneurship. Due to the competitiveness inherent in the sport system taking a biological metaphor to understand the development of entrepreneurship is useful. This is helpful in understanding the way diverse entities in the sport industry interact in terms of pursuing entrepreneurial activity. As there are various entities in sport, it helps to take an ecosystem point of view in terms of how they interact. This chapter focuses on how an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective of sport entrepreneurship is needed to understand the role of stakeholders in the sport industry. Thereby linking the literature on practice theory with entrepreneurship and more specifically entrepreneurial ecosystems.

The sport system is currently changing to take advantage of more entrepreneurial forms of business ventures. Sport start-ups have emerged as a new type of sport venture that can quickly enter the marketplace based on demand. The reason for this growth is due to innovation and knowledge capabilities being needed in sport organizations. This chapter examines the role of sport start-ups in the knowledge economy by focusing on the role of sport technology. This enables a better understanding about how sport entrepreneurship is leading to the formation of different types of businesses that can utilize entrepreneurial finance.

This chapter reviews the growth of data analytics in sport by taking a social media perspective. There has been an emphasis on the use of real-time statistics by sport organizations in order to increase their performance in the marketplace. This has been made possible by increased emphasis on technological innovations that enable data analytics to be conducted. The current developments and areas of application to the sport industry are stated and prospects for future advancement noted. This includes a focus on emerging trends in artificial intelligence and social media marketing. A concluding section focusing on the implications of current research and practice stresses the need for more novel approaches to be used.

The purpose of the chapter is to identify the motives for running (participating in the marathon) among singles and to identify differences in relation to runners in a formal/informal partnership. Using the Motivations of Marathoners Scale (MOMS) questionnaire, a diagnostic survey was conducted among 493 participants of (20th) PKO Poznan Marathon. In the first stage, the motives for running among singles were identified and whether there were statistically significant differences compared to the motives declared by nonsingles (56 motives were analyzed according to the MOMS scale). In the second stage, the differences for nine groups of motives indicated in the MOMS questionnaire were checked, i.e., health orientation, weight concern, personal goal achievement, competition, recognition, affiliation, psychological coping, life meaning, and self-esteem. Statistically significant differences were noted with 2 of the 56 MOMS motives: “to add a sense of meaning to life” and “to stay physically attractive.” The findings about motivations to run among singles can be used in developing more effective marketing strategies in the marathon and sporting events industries.

This chapter analyzes the prediction power of the economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index on the yearly countries ranking from UEFA (Union des associations européennes de football). We used the Bayesian Graphical Structural Vector Autoregressive model as well as the Ordinary Least Squares; we investigate that the EPU index has a predictive power on UEFA countries ranking. Fundamentally, the effect is positive and significant at both lower and higher quantiles of UEFA ranking and the EPU. In the light of these findings, this chapter concludes that economic and political uncertainty factors of each country can serve as a hedging tool against world football ranking.

Although much of the discussion on entrepreneurship education focuses on introducing entrepreneurship skills into other disciplines, the reality is education should be already about challenging existing practices and ways of thinking. This chapter argues that the trend toward integrating entrepreneurship skills into other curricula presents an important shift in teaching practices for sport management teachers. If we begin with the assumption that other disciplines do not have an entrepreneurial mindset, then sport entrepreneurship education cannot be sustainable in its own right but rather needs to be integrated as the foundation for all education courses. Therefore, a number of new approaches to entrepreneurship education are beginning to emerge about the need to develop stronger links between business and other disciplines. These potential synergies will help bring sport entrepreneurship education to the forefront of other disciplines and change sport student's mindsets in terms of learning practices. This chapter aims to contribute to the growing field of sport entrepreneurship education by presenting and analyzing existing research and to suggest future research areas.

The sport, health, and lifestyle sector has been at the forefront of entrepreneurship due to new firms being established that have changed existing business practices. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the following businesses: Fernwood Fitness, KX Pilates, Forever New, Carman's Muesli, and Frequency H20. This enables a better examination of how new sport-related businesses emerge in the global economy.