No abstract

Collaboration between industry and academia is a subject of great interest to sport management academics and sport industry leaders in the United States. However, there is a lack of research regarding barriers to sport industry–academia collaborations and bridging the gap between sport management research and practitioners. The aim of the study was to explore trends in collaboration barriers among various research involvement levels of U.S. sport firms with sport management academia. Data were gathered from 303 sport managers working for U.S. sport companies. Results indicated several barriers for research collaborations between the U.S. sport industry and academia. Such barriers include transactional barriers, sport industry subsectors, sport organizations’ location, and age and education level of respondents.

The growth of sport sponsorship has led to an increase in the number of studies measuring sponsorship outcomes in different sport settings. Most studies, however, have focused on understanding the factors leading to purchase intentions. A more accurate assessment of sponsorship effectiveness would come through measuring actual purchase behaviors. The purpose of this study was to examine a sport sponsorship model that included awareness, fit, attitude toward the sponsor, past purchases, purchase intentions, and actual purchases. Data were collected via longitudinal web surveys conducted with soccer fans from the United States. The results of a structural equation model provided evidence that the relationships among the analyzed sponsorship outcomes did not have a significant effect on actual purchase behaviors. The discussion includes questions about the impact of sponsorship variables such as awareness, fit, attitude toward the sponsor, purchase intentions, and past purchases on actual purchase behaviors.

The reputation of academic programs is increasingly defined in terms of both the generation of high-quality research and the success in transferring scientific findings into commercial development. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the particular channels of research interaction between sport academia and sport companies. The purpose of this study was to assess, for the first time, the degree to which different channels of research interaction could be used to inform the research involvement levels of sport organizations with sport academia. Information was gathered from 292 sport managers working for United States sport companies. The results provide evidence that sport managers who collaborated with sport management academia are more concerned with working on joint research projects with sport management scholars and departments than with academic engagement in patenting and licenses, or involvement in networking, scholars' mobility, and publication research channels.