Managing Knowledge Networks for Sporting Events: Evidence From an Italian Case

In recent years, the increased competition among tourist destinations to attract resources has forced policy makers and organisations to identify new ways to distinguish themselves in the global marketplace. According to the literature on sports tourism, sports play an important role in developing tourism in cities, regions and countries. Sports tourism management is often characterised by a lack of coordination among participating organisations, which tend to pursue individual strategies. This lack of coordination limits the potential value for network stakeholders. Taking our cue from the current sporting events management literature, we suggest that the constructs of cognitive and social capital might offer an important theoretical paradigm for understanding how sporting events can contribute to the building of community networks, improve social relations, nurture mutual learning and knowledge creation and promote sharing among participants in sports tourism management networks. Using a stakeholder approach combined with a knowledge perspective and the theory of inter-organisational relationships and networks, this paper develops a framework through which to analyse sporting event stakeholders and to investigate the knowledge relationships inside networks with the goal of creating value for them and for the community as a whole. Knowledge-based studies have found that social networks allow for the creation and sharing of knowledge. In the sporting events field, the network members play important social and economic roles in event organisation. Studies have shown that network members cooperation can improve the creation and sharing of knowledge. This paper makes use of a case study analysis to understand the success of network relations, knowledge creation and sharing inside sporting events. Our findings show that cooperative network strategies are an important way to manage stakeholders through the facilitation of knowledge sharing. For the purposes of this paper, we interviewed the stakeholders of one of the biggest Italian sporting events as well as the president of the board of the event promoter (EP), that is the focal organisation (FO) inside the network, and we posed questions about the relationships among their organisations. From a practical perspective, the results of this paper may provide support to sporting events organisers, private firms involved in tourism and sports and local governments to better manage sporting events.