Sounds totally obvious now. By then a total new view. However… After the paper appeared it was totally ignored. Between 1984 and 1987 it has 3 citations, two of them by students of Wernerfelt, the other one by his colleague. Even Wernerfelt didn’t cite his own paper while he was writing about work based on the idea. Both the academic world and the practicing managers seemed to be not ready for a view which sounds so obvious, even for the end of the 1980s.

However, around 1988/89 the paper started to get attention from the academic field after some studies on the nature of the “markets” for resources. Even specialized conferences were arranged on the topic. Practicing managers weren’t aware of the RBV until 1990, when the theory got attention in journals like Harvard Business Review and Business Week.

Many aspects of strategic reasoning have been reinterpreted from a RBV perspective.  Anno 2010 aspects of the RBV still come back in any recent study on strategic management, but also in a broad area of other business-related fields such as sponsorship and marketing. Citations to the original article now count over 8500 citations known by Google Scholar.

The perception of sponsorship value by both sponsors and sponsored entities always has been dynamic. Farrelly, Quester and Burton (2006) interviewed senior managers of 28 sport sponsors and sport entities from four different continents about their perception of the change in sponsorship value. Among them were big/known organisations like Coca Cola, Nike, Visa, Manchester United and IOC but also smaller/less known organisations.

From these interviews both sponsors and sponsored entities confirmed the change in sponsorship value perception. Sponsored entities start to understand better if they invest in the relationship, it will also have positive effect for them. The sponsorship value changes from a transactual base to a relational base. Investments in the sponsorship by sponsored entities effects the motivation of their sponsors and will have a positive effect on a sustainable valuable partnership. The most successful sponsorships are strong partnership with two-way contributions.

Other important changes are addressed to the change from  short-term to long-term perception, and the change from peripherical to the core of corporate and brand positioning.

How would you rate yourself as a Social Media Specialist, on a scale of 1 to 10?
I’m a generalist, so I will never attain a high score on any specialization… and certainly not in this one. But I do love innovation, new media, social media, so I’m definitely no specialist but a ‘trialist’.

How do you make use of social media / technical innovation for your work, or towards your customers? What’s the most important reason for doing so?
With social media we are still in phase one, I guess. We currently use hyves to interact with the younger target group, our director has a blog both for our guests and for the theatre community and I use Twitter to interact with guests and to collect and spread theatre news.
Last week we experimented with ‘cocreation’. We asked guests to help our programmer select the play offer. More than 200 guests reacted via Twitter, website and email. We now try to book at least the top five of this list! But there is still a lot to learn for us in the social media field.

When looking at one of the three subjects of this blog (social media, business models
/ strategies and technical innovation for cultural organizations), can you name an interesting development at the moment?
I’ve been cracking my brains for at least a quarter. Does that say enough? To be honest, I’m not a big fan of success stories, as I don’t believe in THE solution for problems.

And is there an aspects of these subjects shouldn’t we focus on anymore?
Please do exactly what you feel to! That’s what makes things really inspiring. People who speak full of passion of their own fascination. Even a blog of a poststamp collector can then be exciting!

What do you think is going to happen this year, what kind of developments can we expect?
In the next year, I think several social media projects will be starting on a national level. So maybe social media will help the cultural field to work together, finally!

I would like to give my reflections on the debate after Keen’s lecture led by Xandra Schutte and with Konrad Boehmer, Amelia Andersdotter, Hans Abbing and James Kirby. The Incubate innovation lecture lived to its name by using an innovative way of audience participation through the use of Twitter. As the discussion proceeded people were twittering on the issues. This was interesting because what was happening was a real time demonstration of one of the discussion topics: filtering. The content of the Tweets varied from being a useless commentary (@ajkeen pronounces Vermeer as ‘Vomir’ #iil09) to legitimate questions (Is internet really democratic? Only 20% of us can take part in this discussion… #iil09) In this case I do felt the tweets needed filtering. Following the different tweets and small talks on twitter doesn’t contribute to an in depth engagement of the discussion. Being distracted by all sorts of sense and nonsense one is constantly filtering, constantly forming an opinion. This can be a good thing but it can also take a lot of energy without really getting somewhere.

I have one point of critic on the discussion of filters. James Kirby made a rather cynical remark like all human filters are hypocrites who want to be taken out to dinner. In the following discussion the filters were interpreted as reviewers or post-artwork filters. But the pre-artwork filters, that decide on the access of an artwork before it has access to a wider audience, such as musiclabels, publishers, etc., were not considered. In my opinion there is a major difference between the two. Thanks to internet the influence of the pre-artwork filters has shrunken significantly with the result that more artists were able to expose themselves and find an appreciative audience. This is for me one of major contributions of internet to the art world.

It seems to be that the internet optimists, such as Amelia Andersdotter, were on average younger than the more pessimistic views like the ones from Konrad Boehmer. For me this discussion is not about the young versus the old. It all comes down to making a system wherein good art can be made and survive. Maybe the older generation tends to think that there was a reasonable, although not idealistic system, in the industrial age.

Obviously money is an important factor in this issue. Where are the cash flows? Ironically enough Keen states that the physical is the value in the new world of the digital revolution. So let’s go see a concert from a band we have checked on MySpace.

Shane Burmania

You can watch video’s of the Incubate Innovation lecture (including Andrew Keen’s keynote) here.

Sponsorship is one of the most important income generators of the cultural sector, but also of the sports sector. Private parties have been donating money or in-kind for cultural and sport events for ages, both without any return and as a marketing tool. However, in the past decennia companies start to implement sponsorship more and more as an important marketing tool in their business model. In times of increasing competition for both the sponsors and the sponsees the marketing tool of sponsorship is getting to a higher level to stay in advance of their competitors. Sponsorship evolves into a professional entity that can be seen as a long-term co-marketing alliance where the sponsor and the sponsee both invest in a structural relation to gain maximum result.

The Australian marketing scientists Francis Farrelly and Pascale Quester published the idea of seeing a sponsorship relationship as a “co-marketing alliance” in 2005. In this post their view is presented, all referring to their journal article (Farrelly and Quester, 2005). Farrelly and Quester analyzed sponsorship relationships between sponsor and sports entity as a form of co-marketing alliance. We assume that sponsorship in sports environment and arts and culture environment is similar in essence.

Traditional sponsorship relations are often one-sided where the sponsor provides financial assistance to the sponsee and uses its philanthropic behaviour as marketing tool. However, Farrelly and Quester believe that a sponsorship relationship have higher potential if operated as a co-marketing alliance.  Five factors which are fundamental for a sponsorship relationship to act as a successful co-marketing alliance are defined:

1. Strategic compatibility – The extent to which both alliance partners have similar goals and views of alliance co-ordination and strategy.
2. Goal convergence – Both parties present a detailed picture where the alliance could contribute to their brand equity.
3. Commitment – The willingness of both parties to make short-term investments to realize long-term benefits from the relationship.
4. Trust – Trust has major influence on relationship outcomes including planning, investment, satisfaction and performance.
5. Economic and non-economic satisfaction – Economic satisfaction is clear: money. Non-economic satisfaction is the positive affective response to the non-economic psychosocial aspect of the relationship.

Often sponsees are the passive party in a sponsorship relation, which prevents the co-marketing alliance model to work in its full potential. If sponsees adopt a more strategic view and become more proactive in investing both financially as with human resources, the potential which sponsorship offers them may evolve to the full potential as a co-marketing alliance.

Farrelly, F.J. & Quester, P.G. (2005). Investigating large-scale sponsorship relationships as co-marketing alliances. Business Horizons, 48, 55-62.

Then you could conclude that expressing yourself on the internet is something for younger people or not done?

I doubt that! It’s more or less, are you comfortable to scream: Look at me!

Or is the case that I wait for the comment of the professional who has a valuable critic about my work. If you are singer per example, and there are a lot of them, there is no guarantee that you will be heard on the internet. In fact I think the chance is diminishing. How do you want to be discovered then? Because of your looks?

We learned from Andrew Keen that a phenomenon like Alfred Hitchcock was ‘one of a kind’, those talents are rare. Isn’t it right that talents like that come out in the open whether they want or not? So is it luck? Is it the environment where you grow up or education? Is it support or chances and taking opportunities to become successful?

Because when you express yourself on the internet there is no reason that, if you have lots of followers, you can trust them for an independent evaluation.

“Don’t trust anyone” is what Conrad Boehmer’s opinion is. “Be confident with yourself because you cannot rely upon all kinds of organizations or opinions anymore”.

If you are that confident with yourself, do you allow then any other authority but yours? Is this what we want? I doubt, that we become very happy in this lonely kingdom, when you are the only inhabitant. “When we want to experience colour, freedom, excitement and power, do we find this in the digital world?” is what Andrew Keen asked us.

We like to experience this with each other, humans are part of a herd and most of them are perfectly happy to find confirmation. And those four elements are also becoming true within the group, because that’s what we do by finding other people by the internet.

Judgment was always involved when a work of art was performed and that will always be the case. How polite and honest is that judgment, does it depend on money, as James Kirkby is suspicious about? The faster the possibilities the lesser the compassion with other feelings? So sms and twitter gives the unpolished and thoughtless messages of reflex?

If there is a growing problem with authority, thus overcharged democracy, then a big danger of internet is the rudeness of manors. Everything for yourself and giving your blunt message to everyone. “The cult of the amateur” according to Andrew Keen in his article in De Groene Amsterdammer.

Does it make us happy, do we share lives and passion? Is there still talent or is talent vanished in the crowd? If we make internet “slow” to avoid shallow community thinking, we can have a useful medium to meet people! Not to advertise hypes or vibes, just care and valuable opinions.

Being aware of evolving arts is a matter of time, slow time. We listen better and hear more and I still want that copy to keep and still that book to read over and over.

I almost understand James Kirkby when he doesn’t care about money, but I am convinced that he has a mission. In fact, releasing work on the internet is not expressing your mission, unless you make that the most important goal. Redefining authority toward compassion, and not yourself as center of the world, makes our world intense and valuable with or without the digital world, together with other people.

Ali Hendriksen
student Master of Music Programming Artez

You can watch video’s of the Incubate Innovation lecture (including Andrew Keen’s keynote) here.

In order to keep the price affordable, the book is being sold at the book’s website for the first few months before distributing it through Amazon.com.