Recently, I had a journal article published in the International Journal and Management Reviews titled “Expanding the Domain of Festival Research: A Review and Research Agenda”. The paper undertook a systematic literature review whereby myself and my co-authors recognised the critical role festival founder’s (entrepreneurs) play in the initiation and continuance of festivals and the importance of the wider networks in which festivals are locally embedded. This paper is novel as it is one of the first papers to look into festivals as a separate entity rather than as an event or as an aspect of tourism. This article highlights the significant role festivals play within local communities and reveals that the continuance of festivals and the wider networks in which they are embedded are rarely discussed. We identify new avenues of research at a micro level, which concern the pre-festival stage, partnerships, primary resources and processes. We also discovered that there are parallels between festival research and the broader entrepreneurship literature and by examining individual actors and the processes involved in setting up and running of festivals, we identify key research gaps and suggest future research directions for theory development of festivals within the entrepreneurship domain. The systematic literature review presents a rigorous method of highlighting the contribution we have made and allows others to follow the methodology for their own research.
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