Stakeholder Requirements and Value Cocreation in Events

Abstract

The festival and events sector comprises a wide range of stakeholders across the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. In order to achieve stakeholder satisfaction, it is necessary to understand what is important to stakeholders, what they consider constitutes project success, and what the factors and measures of that success may be. Once identified and effectively managed, meaningful evaluation can then be undertaken to assess success on stakeholder's terms. This approach also provides an opportunity to consider value creation for stakeholders in relation to their measures of success. The purpose of this research is to develop a robust framework that enables success factors and measures to be identified and effectively measured as part of a holistic evaluation process that contributes to the identification of stakeholder value. Although research is regularly undertaken to assess impacts of festivals and their benefits to stakeholders, there can be competing agendas, project success can be interpreted in different ways with tensions and disagreements in relation to expected outcomes. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly understand stakeholder expectations, community dynamics, and visitors and residents' perceptions of impacts of festivals. A multimethod inductive approach was used to capture the motivations and influences of the stakeholders as social actors during the Tour de Yorkshire (TdY) event. Using this event as a longitudinal case study over an 18-month period, the methodology comprised of qualitative questionnaires and interviews to engage a wide range of stakeholders and used the conceptual Stakeholder Sandwich as the core model to produce a framework and methodology to generate richer data. Results indicated that this model, framework, and methodology proved to be effective for the understanding of stakeholder success factors and contributes towards the understanding of value cocreation for stakeholders in events and festivals. With the immense challenges currently facing the sector, such a framework could prove to be of significant value for practitioners and researchers alike.