Challenging Traditional Growth Strategies - An exploratory single case study on how Forza Football designs user involvement growth strategies to enable viral growth

Abstract: Background and Purpose: In order to stay competitive in a rapidly changing business environment, the question of growth is perceived to be an essential issue of survival and entrepreneurial behavior. Traditionally, strategies related to growth have mostly been related to expenses on marketing or acquisitions of smaller competitors. An alternative to spending money to achieve growth is to employ growth strategies related to market forces such as crowdsourcing and network effects. Growth strategies related to the implementation of crowdsourcing activities and the creation of network effects have proven to be effective strategies for achieving viral growth. This thesis considers a single case study of Forza Football and the purpose of the research is to explore how user-generated content applications can design their user involvement operations to create network effects as means for enabling viral growth. Theoretical Framework: The research builds on an extensive theoretical framework of the concepts of open innovation, network effects and viral growth, with smaller related concepts as subcategories, resulting in a compilation of the characteristics that distinguish each concept and how they are related. Methodology: The thesis is of a qualitative nature and the primary data is collected through semi-structured interviews as well as inside action research to make observations within the organization. The interviews were held with representatives from Forza Football with extensive knowledge of growth-related strategies in order to increase the chances of getting the most relevant empirical data in regard to the purpose. Findings and Conclusion: After summarizing and analyzing an extensive number of empirical findings, several conclusions can be made. It can be concluded that Forza Football designs their application carefully to be able to make use of crowdsourcing and thereby engages their users in the core business strategies and achieves a cost-efficient strategy to grow virally. Besides growth, the user involvement growth strategies come with benefits like competitive advantage where Forza Football is gaining access to information that is difficult for the competition to receive. Moreover, Forza Football designs the crowdsourcing strategy in a way that yields network effects which in turn also favor the company and the users in several ways. Although many benefits come with this strategy it is concluded that there are several challenges related. This thesis presents a new way of cost-efficiently increase a company’s growth in different ways, which is undoubtedly interesting for the majority of profit-driven enterprises. Also, the thesis contributes to theory by a proposed conceptual model explaining the relationship between considered concepts. Furthermore, the conclusion chapter includes practical and theoretical implications as well as limitations and proposals for further research.