Fostering Innovative Cultures in Sport

This chapter contextualises the sport business marketplace. It begins by noting the radical expansion of the industry over the past few decades, from a modest amateur sector to an immense commercial powerhouse. Next, the chapter outlines sport’s remarkable and unique features from both an economic as well as a sociocultural perspective. In this respect, sport can inspire passion and people, it involves merchandise and money, supports ideology and identity, fosters community, enhances profile and professionalism, and generates sponsorship and symbolism. As a result—and as the motivation for this book—the right leadership, culture and innovative practices can create the foundation for social, cultural and commercial progress. The chapter also introduces several key concepts that permeate throughout all the chapters. In order to create a culture that enables innovation, attention has to be given to all aspects of innovation’s deployment. In particular, the book proposes that innovation must be considered within the context of a sport enterprise’s cultural perspective. Other themes address the necessity of bounded risk-taking, entrepreneurship, leadership, and the benefits that arise from an innovative culture. Finally, the chapter highlights the book’s culminating ‘Innovative Culture Framework’, which comprises the dimensions of (1) Leadership, (2) Aligning Business and Innovation Strategy, (3) Fostering Collaboration, (4) Reducing Fear of Failure and (5) Driving Openness to New Ideas. These dimensions provide the catalyst to foster a culture of innovation within sport enterprises to create new sport business trends and capture the resulting market opportunities.

This chapter introduces entrepreneurship as a driver of innovation, social change, and economic development. It argues that entrepreneurship is critical for sustaining economic prosperity through job creation as it improves the competitiveness of an economy and creates new wealth. However, it is equally important to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit even inside established organisations in order to produce a high level of entrepreneurial development and a climate of innovation. The chapter further notes that entrepreneurship should be seen as a core element of sports. Sport enterprises embarking on an entrepreneurial journey for the first time are faced with the need to quickly adapt to situations. Many sport enterprises lack an awareness of the ripple effects that policies, norms, markets and numerous other factors can have on their intended actions. Learning how to ‘play the game’ means learning how to effectively react and even stimulate the ripples in order to not only survive, but thrive in creating new opportunities. The chapter leads to the question of whether sport enterprises can learn how to be entrepreneurial so as to achieve their ambitions. It concludes that entrepreneurship can be seen as a management process wherein entrepreneurial behaviour is crucial to the long-term vitality of sport enterprises.

This chapter establishes the key aspects of leadership that can facilitate innovative cultures in the sport context. In the first section, the chapter discusses the meaning of leadership and culture, and emphasises their important connection with innovative outcomes. Next, the chapter introduces the sport leadership ecosystem and addresses how using this connective framework can enhance leadership capacity and facilitate innovative practice. An introduction to the intelligence panorama provides the tools for effectively activating the sport leadership ecosystem by developing leadership capacities which enable stronger connections and influence. Finally, the chapter explains the concept of innovative leadership, paying close attention to how leaders can best enable innovation within their respective environments. The chapter concludes that innovative leadership can be a decisive facilitator of creativity and innovation in sport enterprises. Leaders set the vision for competitive and sustainable pathways for success. Leadership skills can be learned and honed for the desired effect, and developing capacities for an innovative leadership approach can have a major influence on the successful delivery of innovative outcomes.

This chapter establishes the sport innovation landscape by distinguishing where innovation can occur in the sport industry, and how these sites intersect with a cultural context. The chapter addresses how a sport enterprise can go about mapping its culture with innovation in mind. The first section of the chapter maps the potential sites within the sport industry where innovation can occur. Next, the chapter explores the innovation–culture link through a ‘cultural innovation horizons’ framework. Horizons expose the kind of cultural support that different forms of innovation require in order to be successful and sustainable. Finally, the chapter suggests ways for sport leaders to map their organisations’ cultures with innovation in mind. The chapter concludes that culture can be a repository for unimaginative and conservative values or a foundry for inspiration and enterprise. In sport, it is no longer satisfactory to just cultivate cultures that speak to strength and resilience. Such admirable qualities must be bound together with agility and ingenuity. Innovative cultures drive performance, leverage powerful histories, and change swiftly in turbulent conditions. Sports enterprises with innovative cultures find ways of winning because drive and ambition lies at the heart of their collective meaning.

This chapter highlights the relationship between change and innovation, with a particular emphasis on why a sport enterprise must recalibrate its cultural expectations and norms in order to accommodate a lasting innovative culture. It further explains how sport enterprises can approach innovation in a practical sense. That is, how to cultivate new ideas, develop them into proof of concept prototypes, and subsequently scale these experimental products into commercially viable offerings. The chapter also deals with how innovation can be embedded and integrated within a sport enterprise. It outlines how rituals offer a unique and effective vehicle for cultural modification. Rituals revolve around key organisational functions, instil commitment and belonging, depict successful behaviours, and deliver acknowledgement and attention to those who excel at them. Several team approaches are recommended for tackling pivotal organisational values through rituals and their accompanying narratives, symbols, assumptions, and beliefs. Finally, the chapter provides some guidance on how cultural innovation can be measured. This chapter concludes that many sport enterprises struggle to not only make innovation a living part of their cultures, but to even successfully enable a single, discrete innovative initiative. Sustainable innovation cannot be enforced through directive strategy, procedural compliance, or charismatic leadership. It requires a cultural readjustment of the kind that some might find counterintuitive because innovation thrives in environments that operate as close to chaos as they do to order. Ironically, sport enterprises find this precursor to innovation just as demanding as those from other sectors, despite the fact that their core product resides firmly in that ambiguous, turbulent, and dynamic territory.

This chapter outlines how leadership is integral in the process of developing cultures where creativity thrives and innovations continually emerge. The chapter provides a variety of lenses to view leadership’s role in this process. It notes that there is no one way to lead for this type of environment; however, there are certain leadership approaches which may be more conducive to innovation than others. This will depend on the leader’s inherent qualities and beliefs, and the context and situations in which leadership is present. Due to the fluid nature of the innovation process, effective leadership will instead need to embrace a more flexible mentality. The chapter suggests that sustainable innovative environments do not tend to happen organically. Instead, they are championed by a leader or group of leaders who value this as a key characteristic of a thriving organisation. Leaders who value innovation understand that without embedding a culture of idea creation and the pursuit of operational enhancements, a competitive advantage is lost, and the competition will inevitably win out. This chapter concludes that while effectively managing day-to-day operations is an essential component of business, the role of leadership is to establish a direction. It is therefore leadership that sets the tone for innovation, through clearly signalling its importance to organisational members, and leading in a way which can optimally facilitate its presence and effectiveness.

This chapter argues that sustained innovation is a high-productivity growth state underpinned by a supporting culture that reaches across all aspects of a sport enterprise. This requires a seamless, structured approach that begins with a new paradigm of thinking about management, focuses on the process of cultural renewal, mobilises emboldened but devolved leadership, creates safe boundaries within which ‘unsafe’ ideas can be expressed, and coalesces around the pursuit of culturally driven benchmarks in addition to innovation outcome measures. The chapter discusses the critical necessity of forging the cultural foundations for supporting innovation, and offers some recommendations to address the implementation impasse for sport enterprises just starting the journey. It proposes that every organisational member must be empowered to innovate with the supporting structures to operationalise power. The chapter concludes that as the culture of innovation becomes more embedded, there will be both a move to more quality ideas and a greater devolution of the innovation pipeline into various business units and service arms of the organisation. Along the way, leaders create the boundaries and rules to ensure that innovation efforts can proceed with an optimal combination of creative freedom and practical control.

In bringing the book to a conclusion, this chapter acknowledges that it is not easy to change the culture of sporting enterprise, since they are by nature conservative, masculine institutions, which value their traditions and histories. While organisational culture is troublesome to reveal, and difficult to manage, it remains the cornerstone of any successful change strategy. Despite the conceptual messiness that surrounds culture, a detailed cultural map is the most effective tool for coming to grips with the culture of a sporting enterprise. Some cultures are clearly engines of energy and innovation, but others can be negative, distorted, and dysfunctional. While it was once believed that a strong culture was a good culture, this is no longer the case. For culture to be useful and productive, it must be appropriate to its operating environment. This chapter argues that the key to organisational transformation lies with a leader’s ability to empower others to act on the vision, and once they have established new policies, practices and procedures, to anchor them to the organisation’s culture. This chapter concludes that the best way forward is to utilise the Innovative Culture Framework deploying the five key dimensions of (1) Leadership, (2) Aligning Business and Innovation Strategy, (3) Fostering Collaboration, (4) Reducing Fear of Failure, and (5) Driving Openness to New Ideas, which can be applied to sport enterprises.