Significance of Creativity for Events in the Current Social and Economic Environment - Essay Example

Significance of creativity for events in the current social and economic environment Innovation in event management Innovation is entails people’s activity and organizations’ activity aimed at changing themselves and the environment. It involves breaking routines and dominant ways of thinking by introduction of new things and behaviours and launching new standards. It comprises individual stance, an organizational process and a social movement (Books LLC., 2010). Innovation is a complex development of discoveries and inventions brought about in the business and social environment with the hope of leading to adoption by new users. During adoption process, improvements to both the idea and implementation often require further innovation. More often, successful innovations are imitated by other players in the industry or applied by analogy in other industries (McFarlane, Mayer, and Bertrand, 1999). Several cases of innovation are in existence. They include product, process and behavioural innovation. Innovation is often a mix of the three categories. The effect of innovation is the creation or transfer of economic value. Creation of new value is the strongest form of innovation while transfer of value is a weaker form (Smitz, 2004). Strong innovation takes place when a firm creates economic value (Gore, 2001). Majority of innovation that is driven by competitive forces is of weak form (O’Brien, 2008). In this case no new value for market is created but instead involves redistribution of value among suppliers, competitors, substitutes or consumers (Vaisutis, 2007). This may involve introduction of a better product or the reduction in production or service delivery costs. Weak form of innovation is usually incremental and evolutionary in nature and is thus less disruptive than stronger forms. Innovation and creativity are used by some people interchangeably. However, creativity is getting the great ideas, it is sort of research and development, and everybody is creative, everyone has great ideas and every firm has more great ideas than it can ever implement or bring into market the marketplace. Creativity is the capability or act of conceiving something original or unusual (Smitz, 2004). It involves thinking up new things or concepts. It is dreaming up a new invention and innovation is making it real in ones own unique way. However, innovation is the implementation of creativity. Innovation is taking creative ideas and bringing them into the world so that they can change lives and organizations that bring them into the world. Innovation makes creativity practical and efficient (Gore, 2001). Without creativity there is no concept or product that needs implementation and once something new is thought up it needs innovation (Wheeler, 2008). In some instances innovation can lead to a realization of the creation being impractical and so this new creative idea may be abandoned and a new creative idea may be born thus innovation may lead to creativity. Thus innovation is giving a new direction to an existing idea (McFarlane, Mayer, and Bertrand, 1999). Creativity is vital for innovation for a product must exist at least in a concept stage for you cannot innovate anything that does not exist. Thus innovation depends on creativity but creativity does not depend on innovation. However, the better success of creativity depends on innovation. Thus, creativity and innovation are interdependent and therefore innovation in event management requires creativity. Innovation occurs through network interaction at a special event/festival. Both business and social innovation can result from festival participation. Individuals and firms form the basis of an event network where stakeholders of a festival combine and interact together to produce the event. Physical elements and design of the event The physical setting of an event, which deals with various design and staging activities, is primarily intended to look after the events surroundings and the visitor’s responses to them. The physical responses to an event environment are well understood. In order for an event environment to be effective, its planning and execution need to appeal to all the senses in order to provide a themed environment that would be convincing to the guests (Smitz, 2004). This calls for careful selection of a venue, as it would be easier to adapt a suitable building than to create a total mediaeval experience in a marquee. Once this is done, all the elements of the theme could be prepared from the décor to the costumes. The physical elements of surroundings, backdrops, props, layout, equipment and personal artefact go towards making up holistic environment (Gore, 2001). This holistic environment complemented with cognitive, emotional and physiological responses of the guests help make up what people feel about the event, and will also help determine how the guests interact, how they respond to staff and whether they stay and enjoy themselves. Ticketing and accessibility are some of physical elements that are important in an event. In planning for an event one ought to remember making a decision on when the tickets will go on sale. The tickets need to be available as marketing goes out in order to allow customers to call or go online or travel to buy them from the box office (Smitz, 2004). One need also to decide about how to sell tickets for his/her event. Based on the expected audience or gathered data one can be able to decide which kind of selling tickets is more comfortable to his or her audience (Gore, 2001). Offering a variety of ways through which people can purchase their tickets allows them to choose the easiest way among the variety offered. Selling tickets in advance allows event organizers to know how many visitors to expect to attend the event (McFarlane, Mayer, and Bertrand, 1999). It also allows event managers to use part of the money in organizing for the vent rather than relying on own funding (Hall and Sharples, 2008). Advance selling of tickets is also advantageous since it ensures a smooth cash flow since most preparations for the event has to be paid for in advance (Higham, 2005). In addition, advance ticketing allows event managers to find out how the sales of the event are going and to secure a paid up audience who will still come along if the weather is not so good. Visitors experience in the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in relation to innovation and physical elements and design of the event and their effect on visitors expectations for future event Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) has been running continuously since 1991 (Tim, 2006). The festival screens annually, during March, at the Australian centre for the moving image (ACMI) at Federation Square in the centre of Melbourne (Melbourne Queer Film Festival, 2011). The festival is aided by over 250 volunteer to help out at the annual festival. The core business of MQFF is film screenings, accounting for more than 95% of the business. Some attendees found the 2011 Melbourne Queer Film Festival to be marvellous. The decision by the event managers to screen the controversial film and good old fashioned hilarious costume party where attendees were encouraged to come dressed as their favourite horror or exploitation character or Ticked off Trannies to win great prizes was found to be innovative among the audience (Tim, 2006). Most of those who attended the event in March found the idea of dressing up as trans-people to be the most creative idea and some expect that in future this will be extended to straight be people to dress up as their favourite characters (Melbourne Queer Film Festival, 2011). Ticketing for 2011 Melbourne Queer Film Festival was via online and direct calling. This allowed the audience to book in advance to attend the event. This was advantageous for the festival manager because cash was at their disposal to fund the festival (Tim, 2006). They were also able to make out the number of audience that they anticipated to attend the event (Melbourne Queer Film Festival, 2011). This was good because they new how much space was to be occupied the audience and to avoid cases where the audience was more than the available space. To attend the event people were given a chance to purchase a membership to the festival, which includes concession prices to all festival events, priority ticket booking service for the festival, invitation to the annual program launch and other special events (Melbourne Queer Film Festival, 2011). People were also given a phone number and email address through which they could contact the event coordinators. Purchases of tickets were also done via the festival website which saved time of buying and selling of tickets. The potential participants were given options of purchasing single tickets and multi-session passes in addition to purchasing tickets for special sessions such as queries and celluloid casserole (Tim, 2006). This ensured that attendees only attended sessions that they were interested in and not all events taking place at the festival. The selling of tickets via the festival website made the vent more accessible to many people around the globe. Advance selling of tickets also ensured a smooth cash flow since most preparations for the event had to be paid for in advance. In addition, advance ticketing allowed the event managers to find out how the sales of the event were going and to secure a paid up audience who would still have come along if the weather was not so good. Australians were encouraged to buy tickets since they stood a chance of winning a trip for two to Hollywood and other fabulous prizes. This so many Australians buy many tickets with the hope of winning the grand prize in addition to attending the festival. This innovative way of ticketing resulted in many people attending the 2011 Melbourne Queer Film Festival. Reference Books LLC. 2010. Film Festivals by Culture: African American Film Festivals, Asian American Film Festivals, Christian Film Festivals, Indigenous Film Festivals. Sydney: General Books. Gore, C. 2001. The ultimate film festival survival guide, 2nd Ed. London: IFILM Pub.. Hall, C., and Sharples, L. 2008. Food and Wine Festivals and Events Around the World: Development, Management and Markets. London: Elsevier. Higham, J. 2005. Sport tourism destinations: issues, opportunities and analysis. London: Butterworth-Heinemann. McFarlane, B., Mayer, G., and Bertrand, I. 1999. The Oxford companion to Australian film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melbourne Queer Film Festival. 2011. Home. Available at: http://www.mqff.com.au/ [Accessed 20 June 2011] O’Brien, C. 2008. Flavours of Melbourne: A Culinary Biography. Melbourne: Wakefield Press Smitz, P. 2004. Australia, 12th Ed. Sydney: Lonely Planet Tim, I. August 25, 2006. What's New Inside Film: Employment Opportunity - The Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF).Inside Film Magazine. Vaisutis, J. 2007. Australia, 14th Ed. London: Lonely Planet Publications Wheeler, D. 2008. Lonely Planet Melbourne & Victoria 7th Ed. London: Lonely Planet. Read More