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Although much of the discussion on entrepreneurship education focuses on introducing entrepreneurship skills into other disciplines, the reality is education should be already about challenging existing practices and ways of thinking. This chapter argues that the trend toward integrating entrepreneurship skills into other curricula presents an important shift in teaching practices for sport management teachers. If we begin with the assumption that other disciplines do not have an entrepreneurial mindset, then sport entrepreneurship education cannot be sustainable in its own right but rather needs to be integrated as the foundation for all education courses. Therefore, a number of new approaches to entrepreneurship education are beginning to emerge about the need to develop stronger links between business and other disciplines. These potential synergies will help bring sport entrepreneurship education to the forefront of other disciplines and change sport student's mindsets in terms of learning practices. This chapter aims to contribute to the growing field of sport entrepreneurship education by presenting and analyzing existing research and to suggest future research areas.

Sport entrepreneurship is one of the newer forms of entrepreneurship but is rapidly gaining popularity due to its ability to merge theory with practice. The main difference between sport entrepreneurship and other forms of entrepreneurship is the incorporation of an interdisciplinary perspective. This means unlike other forms of entrepreneurship that are either focused on financial or nonfinancial aspects, sport entrepreneurship offers a unique hybrid conceptualization of entrepreneurship that acknowledges the complexity of the global economic environment. This chapter addresses the need for more research on sport entrepreneurship to take a holistic approach to understanding its meaning and application in business studies.

Within entrepreneurship literature, the conventional approaches inspired by Schumpeter's “creative destruction” have largely emphasized the role of human cognitive processes to come up with new business ideas. In contemporary studies, however, there is a recent research stream wherein creativity is aestheticized. As a research line of the aesthetic approach, there is an increasing interest for playfulness and other signals of enjoyment that can also stimulate the entrepreneur's creative acts.

This chapter is a reflexion about the liberating and creative role of play in the context of sport entrepreneurship, particularly, in the fitness industry. It aspires to give to the recent development of the sport entrepreneurship field a novel twist by relating it to a theology of play. Drawing on the work of one of the most influential twentieth-century theologians who has approached play theology, Hugo Rahner, we present how his theological approach may be used to widen our understanding of sport entrepreneurship. This theological perspective allows us to develop alternative thoughts based on concepts that transcend the typical rationalist business approach and its instrumental language.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems provide a comprehensive way to understand the complexity of sport entrepreneurship. Due to the competitiveness inherent in the sport system taking a biological metaphor to understand the development of entrepreneurship is useful. This is helpful in understanding the way diverse entities in the sport industry interact in terms of pursuing entrepreneurial activity. As there are various entities in sport, it helps to take an ecosystem point of view in terms of how they interact. This chapter focuses on how an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective of sport entrepreneurship is needed to understand the role of stakeholders in the sport industry. Thereby linking the literature on practice theory with entrepreneurship and more specifically entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This chapter contributes to the general debate in entrepreneurship studies about the role of leadership effects. While there has been an abundance of research into the technology industry in terms of leadership and entrepreneurship, less is known about the sport industry. The human capital of sport entrepreneurs is unique due to contextual factors and needs to be studied in more depth. This chapter aims at contributing theoretically to sport entrepreneurship research by specifically focusing on leadership traits and value creation. This means acknowledging that much of the value in sport derives from the cocreation process that is made possible by good leaders. The role of project management in terms of design thinking for entrepreneurial value creation is stated. In addition, suggestions for moving the sport entrepreneurship field forward by taking a leadership approach is stated.

Sustainable development of entrepreneurship could be comprehensively analyzed using a simulation model for entrepreneurship ecosystem based on the system dynamics approach. Thus, a complete analysis of the entrepreneurship ecosystem is of high importance. However, an effective analysis of entrepreneurship ecosystem involves many challenges, such as the presence of several factors which interact with each other in various ways with different complex effects in time. Therefore, the approach used in this study is employing analysis of entrepreneurship ecosystems in sports industry using analysis of dynamic systems.

Several applied issues such as entrepreneurship opportunities, infrastructures, market opportunities and entrepreneurship space in the borders of the dynamic model developed based on the literature and experts' opinion. Finally, a set of strategies based on experts' opinion are ranked with the objective of improvement of evaluation measures using network analysis decision-making approach and fuzzy TOPSIS.

The results obtained indicate the important role of sports entrepreneurship opportunities, sports tourism, market opportunities, entrepreneurship infrastructures and entrepreneurship-oriented environment in the development of sports entrepreneurship infrastructure in Iran. The credibility and efficiency of the proposed model for analysis of sports entrepreneurship have been ultimately shown.

A holistic approach is proposed based on the hybrid system dynamics approach and fuzzy decision-making method to analyses sports entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Many sport enterprises involve family members either as owners, employees or supporters, depending on the circumstances. Despite the embedded way families define and help to build sport enterprises, there is a lack of linkage in the academic literature between family business and sport entrepreneurship. The aim of this article is to understand the linkage in more detail by focusing on the way sport, family and entrepreneurship are embedded in society.

Due to the exploratory nature of the study, a qualitative approach was undertaken to understand the feelings and perceptions surrounding the process of sport entrepreneurship in family businesses.

The findings suggest that family businesses view the process of sport entrepreneurship as being context-dependent that relies on the interaction of family members for its success. This means that networking and co-creation are part of this process.

As the role of families in sport enterprises becomes more acknowledged, it is important that research keeps up-to-date with this trend. Thus, the findings of this article will help more family businesses with their sport-related ventures.

This article is the first to explicitly examine the linkage between family entrepreneurship and sport entrepreneurship, thereby paving the way for more research to examine this interesting research area.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the existing literature in entrepreneurship and innovation and its linkages to sport.

This research involved four main stages: definition of the key aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship; synthesis of the typologies purporting the interplay between entrepreneurship and innovation in sport; showcasing entrepreneurship and innovation in-practice in a sports context; and identifying steps toward the development of an overall sports policy framework.

It was observed that through entrepreneurship, innovation plays a crucial role in contributing to the sports industry through research, and technology adaptation. The wide variation in the adaptation techniques of innovation in the entrepreneurship realm for sports can be supported by three aspects: a strong culture of innovation, the adaptation of technology from other sectors for sports entrepreneurship and network support.

This study highlights the critical role that entrepreneurship and innovation can have on the sports sector. Those in the sports’ field can use this research to continue to push the development of products and services that can improve the field.

There is little emphasis on sports in mainstream entrepreneurship or innovation research. Therefore, this research is one of the few in this area to look at the interconnectivity between entrepreneurship, innovation and sports.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has affected all sectors of the global economy but some have been affected more than others. The sport sector has been especially influenced by the COVID-19 crisis in a way that has never been seen before. This has meant an urgent need for most sport enterprises to think about new business models in order to cope with the change. The purpose of this article is to discuss in more detail how the sport sector can utilise entrepreneurship as a way of combatting uncertainty whilst promoting the recognition of new opportunities.

A review of the existing literature on COVID-19 in terms of crisis management, entrepreneurship and sport is undertaken. This helps to understand the linkage between sport and entrepreneurship and how this can be used in times of the COVID-19 crisis.

All sport businesses, athletes, managers, fans and consumers need to utilise entrepreneurial thinking in order to act creatively. This will help combat the unease and uncertainty, associated with the COVID-19 crisis and create more entrepreneurial ecosystems to develop.

This article is the first to explicitly state the need for sport businesses to harness the entrepreneurial potential of the COVID-19 crisis thereby contributing to new practices that will help the sport sector survive this uncertain time period and flourish in the future.

Entrepreneurship in the sport sector has become an important discussion topic amongst public policymakers in Finland, and the interface between entrepreneurial sport companies and the public sector is crucial in the development of sport entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the entrepreneurial growth of two elite team sport companies in Finland by describing the entrepreneurial characteristics and organizational development affecting their growth. This paper aims at giving new insights into the discussion of growth entrepreneurship in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s) in the team sport context.

A qualitative case study approach was chosen to best describe the phenomenon of entrepreneurial growth in top sport team SME’s.

The results indicate that the entrepreneurial growth in these two cases comes from entrepreneurial opportunities, growth orientation and growth ability. Industry-specific issues, organizational characteristics, a favorable operating environment, entrepreneurially oriented owner-entrepreneurs and the policymakers’ capability of supporting the growth have affected the success of these team sport enterprises.

This study is limited to the Finnish sport context and these studied cases.

This paper explains the entrepreneurial growth of two successful Finnish team sport enterprises and offers interesting insights for sport management and similar entrepreneurial sport enterprises in the industry.

This paper contributes to the discussion of sport entrepreneurship, and, especially, offers further understanding of growth entrepreneurship in SME.