The increasing commercialisation of the sports sector and changing consumer demands are some of the issues that create challenges for non-profit sports in contemporary society. It is important for managers and marketers of these organisations to innovate because innovation is a way to grow within a competitive environment and to meet customers' expectations. The present study aims to develop an explorative typology of sports federations based on their attitudes and perceptions of determinants of innovation and their innovation capacity. A cluster analysis suggested three clusters with different responses towards service innovation: traditional sports federations, financially secure sports federations and competitive sports federations. Sports federations perceiving competition in terms of financial and human resources, favouring change and paid staff involvement in decision-making processes, and with negative economic perceptions are significantly more innovative. These findings have implications for the management and marketing of non-profit sports organisations.
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Companies use crowdsourcing to solve specific problems or to search for innovation. By using open innovation platforms, where community members propose ideas, companies can better serve customer needs. So far, it remains unclear which factors influence idea implementation in crowd sourcing context. With the research idea that we present here, we aim to get a better understanding of the success and failure of ideas by examining relationships between characteristics of ideators, characteristics of ideas and the likelihood of implementation. In order to test the methodological approach that we propose in this paper in which we investigate for business relevant innovativeness as well as sentiment based on text analytics, data including unstructured text was mined from Dell IdeaStorm using webcrawling and scraping techniques. Some relevant hypotheses that we define in this paper were confirmed on the Dell IdeaStorm dataset but in order to generalize our findings we want to apply to the Leg o dataset in our current work in progress. Possible implications of our novel research idea can be used to fill theoretical gaps in marketing literature, help companies to better structure their search for innovation and for ideators to better understand factors contributing to successful idea generation.
The promotor was Prof. Erik Jan Hultink and copromotors Dr Ellis van den Hende en Dr R. van der Lugt. The title of this dissertation is Armchair travelling the innovation journey. ‘Armchair travelling’ is an expression for travelling to another place, in the comfort of one’s own place. ‘The innovation journey’ is the metaphor Van de Ven and colleagues (1999) have used for travelling the uncharted river of innovation, the highly unpredictable and uncontrollable process of innovation. This research study began with a brief remark from an innovation project leader who sighed after a long and rough journey: ‘had I known this ahead of time…’. From wondering ‘what could he have known ahead of time?’ the immediate question arose: how do such innovation journeys develop? How do other innovation project leaders lead the innovation journey? And could I find examples of studies about these experiences from an innovation project leader’s perspective that could have helped the sighing innovation project leader to have known at least some of the challenges ahead of time? This dissertation is the result of that quest, as we do know relatively little how this process of the innovation project leader unfolds over time. The aim of this study is to increase our understanding of how innovation project leaders lead their innovation journeys over time, and to capture those experiences that could be a source for others to learn from and to be better prepared. This research project takes a process approach. Such an approach is different from a variance study. Process thinking takes into account how and why things – people, organizations, strategies, environments – change, act and evolve over time, expressed by Andrew Pettigrew (1992, p.10) as catching “reality in flight”.
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