Cultural entrepreneurship and the Banff Television Festival

Cultural entrepreneurship involves a conception, an initial launch, and a transition to an established event. Each stage generates wicked coordination and financial challenges. We explore this important process by examining the history of the Banff Television Festival, an annual event featuring a competition, workshops, and providing a forum for developing projects. The documentation indicates that the anticipated problems of nonprofit activities — inefficient administration, crude management systems, slow adaptation and little innovation — were not characteristic of the Banff experience. Well informed industry customers and patrons have established an environment which generally encouraged managerial competence and creativity. This benign result may not generalize to other cultural initiatives, in particular to those that serve the public directly and draw patronage from diverse sources.The paper was presented at the 9th international conference of the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Boston, May 8–11, 1996.