Sustainable Business Model Innovation for Event Management

Abstract

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has seriously impacted many businesses with irredeemable consequences, while the rest are trying to keep rowing, believing that making business as usual will save them. Only a few embarked on what academics call the innovation of business models. And they are doing it at the speed of light because the world they knew is no longer the same. The event management domain is not different. There is an urgent need to consider the impact of the emerging trends and the unexpected turbulence on the event industry, in general, and event management in particular. There is a common consensus that business model innovation can provide an effective path towards acquiring competitive advantage. Still, event management practice seems to be facing real challenges connecting related concepts like eco-innovation, stakeholder engagement, long-term sustain- ability (based on the triple bottom line) and impact of public and private governance from both the supply and demand sides. In short, there are very few examples in the industry that connect eco-innovation and the ways organisations create, deliver and capture value (the value cycle), and avoid leaving value uncaptured (Yang et al., 2017). The few examples of the value cycle connected to eco-innovation – i.e., connecting business models and sustainable innovation – concentrate on properly integrating the eco-innovated products, services, processes with working business models. The sort of linear thinking that advocates pursuing the sustainability of a business model by just producing greener or environmentally-conscious services seldom considers eco-innovation of business models as driven by valueholders’ needs and interests. This chapter will discuss how business models in the event industry, while aiming to achieve the sustainability goals, balancing economic, social and environmental needs and requirements for better or greener products and extended value proposals, should realise that these are imposed by the valueholders affecting their value creation, delivery and capture cycle. The chapter starts with an introduction, explaining the relevant basic concepts of business models (BM), business model innovation (BMI) and sustainable business models (SBM) while linking to the concept of eco-innovation. The remaining sections explicate the concept of valueholder from a SBM perspective and its impact on the development and implementation of the SBM. The discussion starts by looking at how the concept of (institutional) logic can help to implement business model eco-innovation, with emphasis on the behavioural aspects that influence the decisions made, which determine the effectiveness of the BM.