Sixteen teams of two, each representing their country, are playing over a six-hole greensomes format which sees both players tee off. One ball is then chosen and alternate shots taken.

Each of the six holes has a theme, including a long-drive contest, nearest to the pin and a 40-second shot clock.

The European Tour has offered a prize fund of €1 million (£847,000/$1.1 million) for the event, which is similar to, but not quite the same as, the World Super Six tournament that debuted in Perth in Australia in February.

According to one of Scotland's two team representatives, Richie Ramsey, golf's governing bodies have been "sleeping at the wheel". He told BBC Sport: "A lot of different bodies have not been doing anything. They say 'this is a problem and that is a problem', but you have to take action.

"This is different and it's been a long time in coming.

"I'm not going to turn round and say GolfSixes is the answer to solving golf's problems, but it's a step in the right direction. 

"Hopefully we can take the good things from this and make it work."

The GolfSixes initiative is taking place just a couple of days after this year's version of a similarly groundbreaking tennis format set up in 2015 - Tie Break Tens - was played out in Madrid.

This short format of tennis, which debuted in London and took place last year in Vienna, operates solely on tie-breaks, the winner being the first to reach 10 points and lead by a margin of two. The event's slogan is "every point counts".

A direct knock-out schedule made this year's version even swifter, and Bulgaria's Grigor Dmitrov and Romania's Simona Halep each earned the winner-takes-all prize money of $250,000 (£193,000/€227,000).

The tournament website maintains the format is designed "to fit into schedules for players, fans and broadcasters who do not have time for five-set matches". Tie Break Tens is "fast paced, ultra-competitive and exciting," it is claimed.

"Who can play? Anyone! Tie Break Tens is for all," the website continues. "Professional and recreational players alike, with simple, traditional tennis rules. The advantage is that it can fit into the busy schedules of time-poor social players, and professional tournaments can crown a champion in a single three-hour session."

As well as going out live on Facebook, Tie Break Tens Madrid was broadcast on Teledeporte TVE in Spain. In the United Kingdom, it was broadcast on Dave, and in the United States it was shown on ESPN 3.

The atmosphere in Madrid's Caja Mágica was by all reports a concentrated version of that in which the annual World Tour Finals take place, with thumping music, strobe lighting, and players - in variously coloured outfits - entering the arena between vertical flames before assembling in a form of dugout courtside.

Phil Anderton, one of the consultants to Tie Break Tens and a former World Tour Finals chairman, told the Daily Telegraph this week that the event was intended to complement the main men's and women's tour rather than compete with them.

"It's about engaging an existing audience and appealing to new fans," he said.

"We're in a very competitive sports and entertainment market, and I stress the word 'entertainment'.

"When youngsters have so many alternatives, it would be naive not ask, 'what can we do to keep interest in the sport and do it in such a way that doesn't damage what we've got that's so successful?' And if it can help bring in a younger audience, then that's great."

The concerns and aspirations voiced by Anderton are echoed by organisers and administrators in virtually any sport you could name.

In January, the principle Olympic sport, athletics, offered its own new take on how to engage with a younger new audience in the form of the Coles Nitro Athletics event in Melbourne, a six-team competition incorporating new events and old events with a new twist.

Sebastian Coe, President of the International Association of Athletics Federations, expressed the overall position of the sport in a newsletter article shortly before the Melbourne experiment.

"Athletics, in its traditional form, remains the cornerstone of the Olympic Games," he wrote.

"And our World Championships remain an incredibly strong and attractive event, as we will see in London later this year as fans pack out the stadium and tune in to watch the world's best compete for records and medals.

"However, we need innovation and more opportunities for our athletes to interact with fans and show their personalities - and Nitro Athletics is a great example of what can be done and what needs to be done to revolutionise how we present our sport and how our fans connect with the sport and the athletes.

"Athletics is a global sport with a global following, but we need events that bring back the fun, the kids and the crowds. And we need to create events that deliver that and add a different dimension to the record-setting events like the World Championships.

"Why not change the format of how athletics is presented? We need brave, bold ideas that engage fans in events and across a range of platforms. The only thing stopping us is our imagination and the courage to try something new."

On the eve of competition, Phil Jones, Athletics Australia's chief executive, told insidethegames: "The sport needs to look at a different model, and this is one that has provoked a huge amount of interest."

Jones added that part of the reason for the new look was attracting broadcasting coverage.

"Outside the coverage of the Olympic Games and sometimes the World Championships, we have struggled in Australia to get any significant media interest in covering conventional athletics competitions," Jones said.

"Channel 7 was not alone in declining to cover our National Championships/Olympic Trials. Nobody wanted it.

"This caused us to rethink our strategy. Australia is a very competitive market when it comes to sports coverage. There are too many sports vying for a very small market. Over the years, many sports have changed their offering to make it more entertaining, especially targeting younger audiences.

"We took the view that whilst our existing properties, like our National Championships, play an important role in our performance pathway and needed to be maintained, we couldn't change these sufficiently to make them attractive to a new audience.

"So we set about inventing a new product with the primary objective of exciting, engaging and entertaining a live and broadcast audience, allowing us to showcase and promote our athletes, hopefully secure broadcast and media interest and generate commercial support for the sport.

"The new product has been developed after extensive consultation with Channel 7. It was important for us that Channel 7, as a partner with a lot of experience in what makes live sport work, were a part of the journey. They are committed to producing and broadcasting Nitro Athletics Melbourne, free to air, live in most states of Australia but delayed in some, for two-and-a-half hours over all three nights. That is seven-and-a-half hours of athletics broadcast nationwide.

"In the longer term we hope that once captured, the audience we secure through Nitro Athletics might take an interest in athletics more widely. If all goes well, the next time we are looking for coverage of our National Championship, perhaps there will be more interest."

Usain Bolt, whose participation in Nitro Athletics was his first appearance in Australia, quickly equated the new form with another of his favourite sports.

"For sure, I think it's going to be great - it’s going to be like cricket, but Twenty20," he said.

Jones underlined that.

"The obvious parallel is with Twenty20 cricket," he said. "It is on the same basis. We tried to think what would an athletics version look like? How could it be more focused and take less time?"

Before the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) introduced their 20-overs game at county level in 2003, it had only been used on an informal, knockabout basis by cricket professionals, mainly for a spot of amusement between matches.

Championed by the then marketing manager of the ECB Stuart Robertson, the short, sharp format was proposed to fill the gap left by the departed Benson & Hedges Cup one-day competition that had been in place since 1972. It was also to arrest the steeply declining attendance at county matches.

Unsurprisingly, there was widespread opposition, but the county chairman voted narrowly, by 11 votes to seven, for the new idea to be tried out.

It worked, with bells on, and 15 years later the biennial International Cricket Council World Twenty20 competition is one of the highlights of the calendar.

This is the model that so many sports are now seeking to emulate.

Rugby union has long since established a thriving variant in the form of rugby sevens, which debuted at the Olympics year and has been a hugely popular feature of the Commonwealth Games since Jonah Lomu helped New Zealand win the title on its first appearance in Kuala Lumpur 19 years ago.

"Sevens is a simplified, high-density version of the 15s game, involving very short, intensive, fluent matches that give a very good idea of what rugby is," World Rugby's chief executive Brett Gosper told insidethegames. "It employs broadly the same rules as the 15s game, and on a given day you can see each team involved playing twice.

"It is a much easier game to follow. The 15s game can take some time to appreciate fully. Sevens is much easier to understand and is ideal for an Olympic audience which is likely to be interested in the Olympics first, and in individual sports after that."

World Rowing, which has recently had to vote to sacrifice lightweight elements in order to maintain its future place in the Olympic programme, has also been contemplating changes to the traditional format of the sport, most notably in providing variants to the 2,000 metre course on which all major championships currently take place.

Also on the rowing agenda is the possibility of embracing mixed events, another element gaining increasing favour within Olympic circles.

Modern pentathlon, an Olympic sport since 1912 but one which has come under heavy pressure to adapt and survive in recent years, has already incorporated mixed relays into its regular competitive schedules.

Having combined the two final elements of shooting and running into one, and substituting pistols for lasers, in the run-up to the London 2012 Games, the sport's governing body has found it relatively easy to adapt its competitive programme and feels more secure in its Olympic presence for doing so.

Triathlon, which first dipped its toe into the Games in 2000 - is an example of a recently established Olympic sport which has tried to widen the appeal of its core event.

Either side of the standard Olympic format - a 1.5 kilometre swim followed by a 40km bike ride followed by a 5km run - there are other events designed to attract a range of new participants from different age groups.

Kids of Steel features a swim of between 100 to 750 metres, a bike ride of between five to 15km and a run of 1.5km. Australia and New Zealand have their own novice categories, respectively 300m, 8km and 2km and 300m, 9km and 3km.

At the other end of the scale are the long distance 02 and 03 events - double and treble the Olympic distance - beyond which are a range of ultra-triathlons.

This is not a fashion, but a movement designed to ensure that future generations are drawn to sports either as participants or spectators. 

As far as the Olympic motto is concerned - Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) it is Citius that looks likely to be the increasingly important element.