Innovation in Sports: Towards New Paradigms for RD

摘要

This paper aims to shed light on the evolution of R&D paradigms that the sports industry is facing, focusing the attention on the changes that incumbent firms need to face in order to survive in a very crowded and fast evolving market. We start our paper presenting a short excursus about the evolution of this industry in the last century, identifying the main driving forces beyond innovation in the sports domain; then we present a taxonomy to classify innovations in this sector and we populate each quadrant with examples. Moreover we discuss about who is innovating in the industry, identifying an evolutionary pattern where new actors are becoming the main players in the scene. In support of our findings we present the Prince case study. Finally we conclude with some hints about what incumbent companies can do in order to keep competing in this sector. Our research has its roots on the R&D management, Open Innovation and Product Innovation literature streams, offering insights about what is happening in a specific industry and addressing new questions for further works on the topic.