Collaborative innovation in sport: Conceptualizing the adoption of new stadium construction from professional sport team and government perspectives

Abstract

The topic of innovation adoption and diffusion has yielded a voluminous body of research whose general purpose is to account for: (1) why one business firm/governing body is more likely than another firm/governing body to adopt an innovation, (2) what factors impact business firms’/governing bodies’ decisions to adopt an innovation, and (3) what influences the adoption of an innovation to spread to other business firms/governing bodies. Curiosity about these areas led the researchers to explore the following question: what factors influence a professional sport team and its corresponding city/state governments to adopt the construction of a new sport facility? The literature on professional sport facility financing is limited in that collaborative innovation has received minimal explicit attention from scholars in comparison to areas such as the economic impact of sport facilities and the political and lawful processes of public financing for sport facility subsidization, both of which benefit from a sizeable body of scholarship. Using Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory and Berry and Berry’s unified theory of policy innovation as a theoretical foundation, a conceptual model of professional sports stadium construction adoption is established to account for determinants from the perspectives of professional sport teams and city/state governments. Key words: Diffusion, facilities, governance, policy, sport venues.