Industry Digital Transformation and the Role of Industry Platforms and Public Entrepreneurship: The Digital Transformation of Australian Sport
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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The primary purpose of the sport industry is to create and deliver sport experiences. Sport experiences are co-created activities in which multiple actors coordinate their resources, products, and services to deliver an experience for the ultimate benefit of the sport consumer. In a complex industry, how do you support sustainable digital transformation while balancing the needs of consumers, organisations, and institutional actors? This study addresses this question.
Within the broader digital transformation literature, there have been calls for a multi-level understanding of digital transformation at the ecosystem, industry, and societal levels. This study responds to calls for further empirical research in this area by examining digital transformation efforts within the Australian sport sector. The research introduces a multi-level conceptual framework to guide the digital transformation of complex industry sectors, drawing on literature from service innovation, information systems, strategic management, and public administration.
Taking an action design research approach, the research context is established by a review of the Australian Sport Commission’s (ASC) industry digital transformation initiatives from 2013 to 2024. The research then examines a six-month pilot digital transformation intervention run by the ASC, which involved six sports and four sport technology organisations.
The research found, in the context of the ASC pilot, that an experience-organisation gap and organisational and structural complexity cause digital transformation barriers. The study concluded that digital projects are often overly focused on the needs of the initiating organisation rather than on a human-centric, multi-stakeholder, and multi-level delivery approach needed for digitally transforming co-created sport experiences within a complex industry.
This research contributes to both the digital transformation and digital governance aspects of sport management by examining how a service ecosystem approach can be adopted when attempting to digitally transform a complex industry, in this case, the Australian sport industry.
Building on existing service ecosystem and digital transformation research, the study demonstrates how sports institutions and organisations can overcome the challenges associated with the digital transformation of their sport while operating within the inherent capability and capacity constraints intrinsic to the sports landscape. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed, along with areas for future research on the digital transformation of sport.
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