Collaborative innovation: Catalyst for a destination’s event success

Purpose: 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. Design/methodology/approach: 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. Findings: 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. Research limitations/implications: 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. Practical implications: 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. Originality/value: 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