The Welcome to the Village Festival as an Interactive Space for Entrepreneurial Innovation: Lessons Learned

This article presents an exploratory study of the potential role of a music and arts festival in supporting entrepreneurial innovation processes. Although festivals in practice are developing their function as innovation facilitators, there has been only little academic attention from both entrepreneurship and festival studies for this trend. This article brings together extant literature on entrepreneurial innovation and festival spaces to conceptualize how interactions enabled by festivals may support entrepreneurial value proposition development. Based on a qualitative exploratory case study of the innovation program of the Dutch Welcome to the Village festival it is shown that festivals can potentially facilitate useful interactions with various stakeholders for entrepreneurs. It is found that these interactions can inform the direction of the entrepreneurial process and product/service development. However, relevant potential interactions remained latent and the transference of the results beyond the festival was limited. Recommendations are made on how this potential of the festival may be more strategically exploited. We propose that a more purposeful interaction design could benefit the festival-innovation programs (e.g., by mapping the connections as we have in this article). It also recommended for managers of these innovation programs to develop organizational structures that bridge the apparent divide between the festival and real world.