Event Innovation during Times of Uncertainty

To support recovery from COVID-19 and to answer OECD’s call for crucial policy objectives for “supporting tourism businesses to adapt and survive” and “building more resilient, sustainable tourism” (OECD, 2020, p.5), this project aims to highlight certain areas of key importance needed to build event resilience and to provide best-practice industry examples that foster innovative, adaptable and transformative event environments.

It has been worrying to witness the fragility of events, exposed by the global context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the very fabric of events, which are defined as a “spatial-temporal phenomenon, and each is unique because of its interactions among the setting, people, and management systems – including design elements and the program” (Getz, 2008, p.404), has been contested.

Specifically, some of the most prominent event attendance motivations are, intuitively, of social and location-specific natures. Event attendance motivations, such as socialization, escapism, being a true fan that is loyal to an event and an event’s geographical location (Dragin-Jensen et al., 2018), cannot currently be activated due to prohibitions of mass gatherings and travel restrictions. Event organizers have exercised temporary solutions, mainly using digital technologies (i.e., streaming an event), yet researchers have noted that broadcast and traditional event experiences are “two different experiences, not substitutes” (Mueser and Vlachos, 2018, p.183).

To support recovery from COVID-19 and to answer OECD’s call for crucial policy objectives for “supporting tourism businesses to adapt and survive” and “building more resilient, sustainable tourism” (OECD, 2020, p.5), this study aims to highlight certain areas of key importance needed to build event resilience and to provide best-practice industry examples that foster innovative, adaptable and transformative event environments, which are areas of high academic and managerial relevance. We therefore answer Armbrecht et al.’s (2020, p.8) call for event and festival research during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore “the importance of understanding failure, crisis, innovation and recovery”.

1. Project planning (Winter/Spring 2021)
2. Data collection (Spring 2021)
3. Article(s) writing (Spring/Summer 2021)
4. Dissemination activities (Winter 2021/Spring/Summer 2022)

The output will be multiple peer-reviewed articles, as well as one peer-reviewed book chapter. Within this output, several methods will be used, namely:

1. Descriptive method
2. Mixed methods approach (Survey and in-depth interviews)
3. Qualitative approach (semi-structured interviews)

The project is expected to develop a better understanding of innovation and resilience from an event management perspective.

The project’s output will be on:

1. Article on effects on COVID-19 infection control measures on the festival and event sector
2. Article on event innovation during times of uncertainty
3. Article on building a resilient event sector in times of uncertainty
4. Book-chapter on sport event innovation during COVID-19

The project will, in an international context, allow for a broader understanding of how events and festivals can better gear themselves to become an innovative and resilient enterprise, and how the sector can therefore be better geared for future times of uncertainty (which is definitely a question of when the next time this will happen, rather than if).