Bridging the Gap: U.S. Sport Managers on Barriers to Industry–Academia Research Collaboration

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.

University-Industry Knowledge Transfer: Channels of Sport Research Interaction

“…Thus, the main disincentive to this type of research for sport faculty is the difficulty in meeting academic goals, especially journal publications (Gerrard, 2015;King, 2013). Moreover, Zaharia and Kaburakis (2016) acknowledged that a potential solution for this type of problem will depend on having practice academics or professors of practice to bridge the gap in research with the industry by emphasizing the potential of sustained ijbm.ccsenet.org…”

“…Furthermore, as per the resource-based view, companies will achieve a sustained competitive advantage if such resources are, for example, valuable in the sense that they exploit opportunities and/or neutralize threats in a firm's environment (Barney, 1991). Yet, sport practitioners may perceive sport academic research as having little value because managers consider academic scholarship irrelevant to their work (e.g., Fink, 2013;Miller, 2012;Newman, 2014;Welty Peachey & Cohen, 2016), or sport practitioners do not identify the value related to cooperating with sport management academia in the first place because of transactional barriers, such as finding the right sport research publications or locating the right sport scholars inside a university (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016).…”

“…To exemplify, sport scholars are worried that the academic dialogue among them maintains the distinction between theory and practice (Costa, 2005;Irwin & Ryan, 2013), and that the sport management theory building may not be useful to sport managers (Chalip, 2006;Fink, 2013;Newman, 2014). However, it seems that U.S. sport companies and their sport managers do not have a trust or a research relevance issue, but more of a transactional issue when collaborating with sport management academia (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016). Therefore, finding the right research publications or locating the appropriate sport scholars inside a university, or knowing the costs (i.e., time or money costs) related to cooperating with sport management academia, are important transactional contributors in bridging the research collaboration gap between the sport management academia and the sport industry (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016).…”

“…However, it seems that U.S. sport companies and their sport managers do not have a trust or a research relevance issue, but more of a transactional issue when collaborating with sport management academia (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016). Therefore, finding the right research publications or locating the appropriate sport scholars inside a university, or knowing the costs (i.e., time or money costs) related to cooperating with sport management academia, are important transactional contributors in bridging the research collaboration gap between the sport management academia and the sport industry (Zaharia & Kaburakis, 2016). Nevertheless, despite the sport research progress on explaining research barriers, a gap still exists in the understanding of industry-university channels of research interaction (Chalip, 2006;Costa, 2005;Irwin & Ryan, 2013;Parks, 1992;Welty Peachey & Cohen, 2016).…”

Knowledge transfer and university-business relations: Current trends in research

“…With a large concentration of articles, the topic of greatest importance is considered to be that (2016), Ratten (2016) and Zaharia and Kaburakis (2016).…”