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Arne Grüttner
Changing the Game: Applications of Digital Technologies and Their Impact in the Sports Industry
2021
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Grüttner, Arne
Advances in digital technologies, such as cloud computing, electronic platforms, and artificial intelligence, enable the improvement of existing as well as the innovation of entirely new products and services in the sports industry. For example, over-the-top media services such as DAZN or Amazon's sports streaming initiative are digital technologies that promote a massive shift in the viewing habits of fans – away from traditional television broadcasting and towards tailored live and on-demand streaming sports consumption. However, while the digitalization of the sports industry is favorable in many cases, digital technologies present major challenges to the stakeholders of the sports industry in practice: first, they struggle to understand and unleash the full beneficial impact of digital technologies due to a lack of know-how and missing resources. Second, digital technologies facilitate the integration of new actors that provide the sports industry with novel resources, skills, and competences. As a result, the competitive dynamics are increased, and industry competition may be reshaped.
From an academic perspective, this ongoing digitalization of the sports industry provides unique opportunities to study digitalization-related phenomena that cannot be easily observed in other business contexts. In this vein, a research agenda for the Information Systems (IS) discipline on “why and how should we study sports digitalization” was proposed by Xiao et al. (2017, p. 3). The cumulative dissertation at hand, therefore, addresses both the abovementioned challenges from practice and the calls from researchers. To do so, it is comprised of five publications (I – V) that tackle problems derived from practice and demonstrate theoretical knowledge as well as practical guidance on how digital technologies can be applied beneficially in the sports industry.
Publication I examines the current state of research on digital technologies in the sports industry in the IS discipline through a concept-driven literature review. Based on these initial findings, Publication II applies data mining techniques and a sentiment analysis to investigate the impact of social media on athletes’ performances. In Publication III, state-of-the-art data mining and natural language processing techniques are applied to extract the wisdom of an online community of sports tipsters to improve sports betting returns. Publication IV investigates how sports organizations can use social media to enhance international fan engagement. Lastly, Publication V demonstrates how a web-based information technology (IT) tool supports sports organizations during the analysis and processing of cooperation requests.