Abstract
In designing a brand-new sport, do basic tenets of digital entrepreneurship such as ‘solve a user problem’ apply? How is it possible to understand who the potential audience might be for a product and experience that does not yet exist in a Culture Industry such as sports? The paper examines the beginnings of an Australian startup with an early-stage product in the sports and entertainment industry and its use of digital ethnography to investigate key audience segments. The process of audience development occurred alongside the prototyping and testing of a high-tech product that is central to the sport. As the product underwent iterations of development and release, audience interaction with the product was tracked through social media. Discourse analysis of audience engagement with the product on Facebook was conducted to inform a series of user personas that indicated a heavy male bias in the future audience. In exploring the intersection of sports, Cultural Industries and digital entrepreneurship, the paper concludes with observations of how this case challenges each of those notions through the process of ‘starting up’.
Highlights
In designing a brand-new sport, do basic tenets of digital entrepreneurship such as ‘solve a user problem’ apply? How is it possible to understand who the potential audience might be for a product and experience that does not yet exist in a Culture Industry such as sports? The paper examines the beginnings of an Australian startup with an early-stage product in the sports and entertainment industry and its use of digital ethnography to investigate key audience segments
In addressing the research question of how ethnography can play a role in sport entrepreneurship, how a sport culture can be designed around an experience and product, the results from digital ethnographic data collection showed that the characteristics of users’ comments fell into four main categories: 1
As a sport, despite that it may be an example of sport entrepreneurship
Summary
In designing a brand-new sport, do basic tenets of digital entrepreneurship such as ‘solve a user problem’ apply? How is it possible to understand who the potential audience might be for a product and experience that does not yet exist in a Culture Industry such as sports? The paper examines the beginnings of an Australian startup with an early-stage product in the sports and entertainment industry and its use of digital ethnography to investigate key audience segments. The relationship between sports and the Cultural and Creative Industries is explored in this paper through a case study in digital entrepreneurship It examines how a new sport, based on competitive weapons-based martial arts combat, was designed for entertainment and centred on the development of a high-tech body armour worn by combatants. Whereas the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) sport involves bare hand mixed martial arts, UWM proposed the same ‘survival of the fittest’ style of contest using weaponsbased combat. In this sense, it has all the hallmarks of a sport: physical activity involving play, skills development and competition [1] Rattan [4] (p. 4) contends that a sport must have a following in order for it to be considered a sport
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