Norin Arshed is Programmes Director for Leadership and Organisational Performance suite of MSc programmes in the Department of Business Management at Heriot-Watt University. She is an economist by background with professional experience both in the public and private sectors. Her work concentrates on enterprise policy. In particular, the role and contribution from those closely linked to the formulation process (ministers and civil servants), whilst also examining how enterprise policy is implemented (national, regional and local economic development agencies), and how entrepreneurs/SMEs experience and utilise such policy initiatives. Institutional theory is the theoretical lens used to highlight the dynamics of the enterprise policy process in her work. She is involved with projects and research with numerous stakeholders: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; numerous prominent think tanks; Rio de Janeiro University, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Japan); Industry Canada and many others.

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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