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This study highlights areas of key importance for building event resilience and provides best-practice industry examples that foster innovative, adaptable and transformative event environments, which are areas of high academic and managerial relevance in times of uncertainty.

The study employs a multicase study research design that draws on interviews with the leaders of four event organizations in Denmark and Norway: (1) the Steinkjer Festival, (2) Run Alone Denmark, (3) FC Midtjylland and (4) the Bergen International Festival.

The events demonstrated the critical necessity of understanding innovation and its contribution to resilience in the event sector, particularly in times of uncertainty, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These organizations achieved success by continuously fostering innovative environments before COVID-19 by being value-driven and customer-centric organizations. Digital technologies were not used as makeshift solutions but rather to enhance event attendees' experiential platforms and expand each event's business potential.

The paper answers the call for event and festival research during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the importance of understanding failure, crisis, innovation and recovery.

The paper's contributions to event management research are (1) adding to the ongoing discussion about building a resilient event sector in times of uncertainty, (2) screening how event organizers achieve innovation in their organizations and (3) providing insights on future requirements for events in a post-COVID world.

This paper aims to empirically investigate how event innovation may induce desirable corporate branding.

A survey yielded 280 complete responses from tourists who had attended an event in Macau. Structural equation modeling was used to test the innovation-corporate loyalty framework through perceived event value and corporate image, with a multi-group comparison to examine differences between first-time and repeat customers.

The results indicate that innovation is not only the key to value enhancement of the event but also an efficacious instrument of branding the parent company and building corporate loyalty; only product-related innovation has a significant impact on event value; both functional and emotional values induce a more favorable corporate image; and event-induced corporate branding is more effective in securing repeat business than attracting new clientele.

The findings help hospitality operators and event planners to leverage innovative events for corporate branding and cater to different customer segments by providing distinct marketing strategies.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge regarding event management and corporate branding and sheds light on future research to explore the initiative and benefit of pushing forward event innovation.

This paper aims to contribute to theory concerning collaborative innovation through stakeholder engagement with reference to Glasgow City Marketing Bureau’s (GCMB’s) management strategies, which represent UK best practice in events procurement, leveraging and destination branding.

The research adopts a case study design to facilitate an in-depth evaluation of the destination marketing organisation’s (DMO’s) critical success factors. Multiple perspectives on GCMB’s collaborative innovation are achieved through semi-structured interviews with senior managers from the bureau, key stakeholders and other DMOs.

GCMB’s success results from long-term, extensive, collaborative engagement, a unique institutional structure and sustained political and financial support through to transformational leadership, strategic event selection and targeted marketing through “earned” distribution channels.

The study takes a single case study approach and focusses on GCMB’s event-led branding strategy. Given the importance but relative neglect of long-term inter-personal relationships in collaborative innovation, future research should focus on the development of social capital and adopt a longitudinal perspective.

The paper provides insights into the collaborative innovation process with a range of stakeholders, which underpins GCMB’s events strategy and its leveraging of the city brand. In particular, the study highlights the need for entrepreneurial leadership and the development of long-term relationships for effective engagement with stakeholders.

Previous research has focussed on outcomes and neglected pre-requisites and the process of collaborative innovation between destination stakeholders. This study examines this issue from the perspective of a successful DMO and presents a conceptual framework and new engagement dimensions that address this gap in knowledge.

The purpose of this study is to investigate sequences of event and the resulting innovation paths and trajectories followed by a university spin-off organization.

A single longitudinal case study methodology was applied to analyze innovation events and paths along the trajectory. Narrative methods were used to analyze actor perceptions on innovation processes/events.

The study categorizes events and paths in two categories, technical and commercialization, and finds that lock-in events matter for convergence of an innovation trajectory. The results indicate that understanding critical events may assist timely interventions in the innovation paths, thus potentially avoiding disruptions of the development of an innovation trajectory. The temporal processes reveal contrasting convergence–divergence patterns in the trajectory, depending on the types of events that occur.

Using a single case data may limit the applicability of the findings, which calls for future research.

Industries could monitor the technical and commercialization paths as a strategy to reduce “vulnerability” of the innovation trajectory and possible negative impacts. Knowledge about the role of the CEO is key for a university spin-off organization.

This study presents a new typology of events and paths, identifies and characterizes lock-in events and shows the relatively fragile dexterity between convergent and divergent paths along an innovation trajectory.

This paper aims to reveal how different types of events and top management teams' (TMTs’) cognitive frames affect the generation of breakthrough innovations.

Drawing on the event system theory and upper echelon theory, this study chose a Chinese manufacturing enterprise as the case firm and conducted an exploratory single-case study to unpack how breakthrough innovation generates over time.

By conducting the in-depth case analysis, the study revealed that firms do not produce breakthrough innovation in the catch-up stage and parallel-running stage but achieve it in the leading stage. It also indicated that when facing proactive events in the catch-up stage, TMTs often adopt a contracted lens, being manifested as consistency orientation, less elastic organizational identity and narrower competitive boundaries. In addition, they tend to adopt a contracted lens when facing reactive and proactive events in the parallel-running stage. In the face of reactive and proactive events in the leading stage, they are more inclined to adopt an expanded lens, being manifested as a coexistence orientation, more elastic organizational identity and wider competitive boundaries.

First, by untangling how TMT's cognitive frame functions in breakthrough innovations, this paper provides a micro-foundation for producing breakthrough innovations and deepens the understanding of upper echelon theory by considering the cognitive dimension of TMTs. Second, by teasing out several typical events experienced by the firm, this paper is the first attempt to reveal how events affect the generation of breakthrough innovation. Third, the work extends the application of the event system theory in technological innovation. It also provides insightful implications for promoting breakthrough innovations by considering the role of proactive and reactive events a firm experiences and TMT's perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize sport event innovation and propose a fruitful future research agenda for scholars.

Following Gilson and Goldberg's (2015) criterion of a good conceptual paper, the authors (a) provide a review of the central tenets of innovation and sport innovation literature and link them together within a new definition of sport event innovation, (b) expand the field by suggesting several theoretical perspectives for studying this area and (c) visually represent the links between each aspect of our conceptualization in a figure. Based on our definition, the authors also highlight illustrative examples of sport event innovation.

This paper provides an initial working definition of sport event innovation and offers avenues of sport event innovation research underpinned by various research perspectives (i.e. process of innovation, institutional theory, stakeholder theory, interorganizational relationships and knowledge-based view) likely to prove useful for the advancement of scholarship in sport event management. Additionally, a general recognition of the potential practical implication related to this paper is discussed.

This conceptual paper bridges the knowledge gap between sport event and innovation research by merging the independent literature and conceptualizing sport event innovation. In doing so, the authors provide an advantageous starting point for future research on innovation in the sport event context with a view towards advancing both theory and practice in this area.

This chapter explores how the adoption of Web 2.0 social media platforms as information communications technology (ICT) innovations is impacting organizational design, culture, and human resource management (HRM) in events. Individuals responsible for the development and implementation of social media in 12 event organizations were interviewed regarding its adoption and how it impacts work in their organizations. Three types of innovation adopters were identified: spontaneous activists, spontaneous reactors, and organized initiators. The findings demonstrate that the use of social media in event organizations is impacting event workers by creating role overload and ambiguity. This chapter discusses implications for event organizations and their employees in terms of HRM policy, performance management, workforce skill development, recruitment, and retention.

Major sport events are facing increasing demands. These events are no longer “just” about sport, but are now expected to be sustainable, multicultural, democratic and convey specific political values such as “unity,” “identity” and “peace.” The increasing demands on major sport events place local hosts in a difficult situation, accommodating both the organization of the sport competitions and the ideologies connected to these events. The purpose of this paper is to identify motives for engagement among stakeholders of the 2017 Barents Summer Games. Furthermore, it investigates how and in what ways these motives are conflicting, and what the consequences of conflicting motives of engagement can be for the development of innovation in major sport events.

The empirical data in this study are derived from one year of ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on participant observations of the planning and execution of the 2017 Barents Summer Games.

The analysis identifies key economic, socio-cultural, political and athletic motives for engagement among six different stakeholders involved in the games. Additionally, the results indicate how there are both conflicting economic, socio-cultural and political motives for engagement among the stakeholders. Finally, the analysis illustrates how conflicting motives for engagement constitutes an innovation barrier for major sport events.

The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork of the planning and execution of the 2017 Barents Summer Games, a major sport event in the Barents region. The Barents region is characterized by its unique nature and vulnerable environment, with wide tundra areas in the north and extensive boreal forests zones in the south. The region represents an area as large as Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France (mainland) and Spain (mainland) together, totaling 1.75m km². Several indigenous peoples and minority groups live in the region, such as the Sami and the Komi. Hence, the context of the study is quite unique and the results may not be transferable to other major sport events with regional significance.

Previous research on motives in major sport events have focused on motives and motivation for engagement among volunteers in major sport events. The paper contributes to this research field by studying motives of engagement among stakeholders from private, public and volunteer sectors in a major international sport event with regional significance.

This study investigates the mediating role of organizational change capacity (OCC) in the relationship between the perception of extreme contexts and firm product and process innovation, which was not empirically investigated in the literature. In addition, this study explores the moderating role of the perception of extreme contexts-related variables, which were not operationalized in ordinary firms, on the relationship between OCC and firm product and process innovation.

A questionnaire-based research was conducted to test the suggested hypotheses. The data were gathered from 90 firms during the peak period of COVID-19.

This study shows that OCC, which covers contexts, process and learning dimensions, fully mediates the relationship between the perception of extreme contexts and firm product and process innovation. Also, this study discovers that the perception of extreme contexts, including temporal ordering of extremity, the magnitude of consequences, proximity among people and operational deficiencies, positively moderate the relationship between OCC and firm product innovation.

This study has constraints inherited in survey design, primarily sampling and country context.

This study identifies, conceptualizes and operationalizes the term extreme context, conceptually argued for particular organizations/units in ordinary/mundane organization settings so far. In addition, this study extends the current understanding of how the perception of extreme contexts interacts with a firm's capability to increase innovation efforts. Further, this study shows how OCC mediates the relationship between extreme contexts and firm product and process innovation.

This research provides a bibliometric review of the state-of-the-art information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of events, and maps out an agenda for future directions on how innovations in the technological realm can help fostering sustainability in the events industry.

To explore the progress of ICTs and future applications in events, this study conducts a two-fold method of a bibliometric analysis and a modularity clustering technique based on 293 papers published in the last 30 years.

The findings offer a snapshot of the past progress to offer a glimpse into the future by formulating novel areas for research that merit attention. By interweaving the past, present and future towards sustainability, an agenda with four concrete areas for research is identified, including (1) virtual events, (2) the use of artificial intelligence, (3) big data technology, and (4) virtual reality and augmented reality in the events industry.

The current global challenges together with the rapid technological progress can particularly give rise to innovations in the technological sector. Through a bibliometric review of past research, this study offers a future research agenda of ICTs in the events sector in light of the Sustainable Development Goals. It contributes with a discussion on how to harvest the technological progress to create more sustainable events.