Festival business model – generic canvas

Hello. As we’ve said before here at festivalslab we’re *big* fans of the visual business model tool called the Business Model Canvas.  It’s a bit beyond this post for me to explain exactly how the canvas works and how practical a tool it can be for you but you can find out more by reading the Business Model Generation book of which an extract is here.

So this is the start of a little series of posts – which in time will probably become a section of the site – all about the visualisation of festival (and other) business models.

There are 12 festivals within the Edinburgh family as you know but here at festivalslab we think about there only actually being only 5 main types within that:

1. Curated – curated programme across multiple venues over a set period of time.  This applies to International, Jazz&Blues, Book, Storytelling, Imaginate, Science & Film
2. Open platform - democratic programme which is created by participant entry and no overall curator.  This applies to the Fringe
3. Aggregator – festival comprised mainly of existing events.  This is how the Art festival works.
4. Field festival – more of the music festival format with a bound area and one ticket.  This is Hogmanay and the Mela.
5. One-off event – a high-profile, high-production single event over multiple dates.  This is of course the Tattoo.

There are of course many subtleties within this and every festival is different but thinking in these general terms can be very useful from an innovation perspective.  To that end we’re going to start sharing how we think festivals (and innovation in festivals) work through the canvas tool.

So to start, here is our first draft of the most general view of the most common type of arts festival – the curated festival.  And since the nice people at BMG have launched their sexy new iPad app we thought we’d use that.  Again…if the taxonomy doesn’t make sense – and you’re suitably interested – we strongly recommend you look at the BMG methodology but hopefully it’s intuitive enough at this point.

Business Model Canvas: curated festival (general) v1

Download the large version here