Cultural Festivals Management Development Based on the Principles of Sharing Economy

The specifity of the way organizational committees of festivals work is determined by the periodical nature of festivals. Festivals are pulsating organizations. The resources for organizing such events are used by event organizers many times. However in between events such resources are usually are not in-demand. Though costs of keeping and maintaining these resources are fixed and permanent. The need of the special tool that will help to rationalize resources’ use and minimize costs is quite obvious. To make the process of changing, selling, buying and renting such resources for organizing events easier a special web-service should be developed. The process of development should consider the best practices and opinions of the professionals of the event industry (and the potential users of this web-platform as well). The aim of this research is to identify ways elements of the sharing economy may be integrated into the process of organizing cultural festivals. The subject of this research is implementation of the sharing economy concept’s elements into organizations of cultural festivals. The object of the research is online platforms and different services of collaborative consumption which are used while organizing cultural festivals. The main part of this paper consists of three chapters. The first chapter is about theoretical aspects of the special events’ organizational process (with the emphasis on cultural festivals). The “special event” is defined. Its typology is provided as well. Then a festival as one of the special event’s type is reviewed. We examine its peculiarities and its nature as a pulsating organization. As a result of the research a business model of a web-platform with elements of sharing economy were developed. While developing the business model such methods as web analytics, interviewing, questioning, parsing and work with “Google Adwords” and “Yandex Direct” were used.