Adoption of the open innovation paradigm within the Sports Industry

Abstract

Innovations play a pivotal role in today’s corporate strategy. The ability to innovate is a
basic requirement to persist in the global competition and to stay successful in the long run.
The sports industry is characterised by an intense, dynamic and competitive environment.
The customer’s lifestyle orientation becomes increasingly important and product lifecycles
get shorter and more individualistic. With those changing conditions and evolving demand,
companies have to pay close attention to their innovation process. To respond to these
challenges, more and more companies open up their innovation process and look for
partners with complementary expertise to collaborate with. This is called open innovation.
The thesis aims to answer the research question, namely: “How companies in the
sports industry use open innovation and which methods are implemented during the
innovation process?” In order to answer this question, a multiple-case study analysis was
conducted. Three principal companies – Canyon GmbH, Mizuno Corporation and Under
Armour – as well as one crowdsourcing platform – ISPO Open Innovation – have been
investigated.
The main findings show that all companies are highly dependent on innovations and
have approached different ways to interpret and put open innovation into practice. Overall,
the companies follow to some extent a unidirectional approach, meaning they rather enrich
internal projects with inflows of external knowledge than find new paths to markets by
providing their know-how and technologies to the external environment. Two companies are
even more protective and closed regarding their own resources. They concentrate on
collaborations with trusted partners, which offer a higher degree of control, security and
familiarity. Especially larger and well-established companies fear unbeneficial leakage of
knowledge and technologies to externals through open innovation. To conclude, the degree
of openness and the way sports companies collaborate is rather organic and restricted to
some extent. However, the development of open innovation strategies indicates that
openness is imperative in order to stay competitive in the long run.

Date of Award	28 Jul 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Valérie Moatti (Supervisor)