Why disrupt when you can simply return to normal? Consequences of Montreal's festivals resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic

Crisis are usually considered as disruptive events that may act as moments of opportunities to innovate. The example of the cultural organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated health restrictions shows that many of these organizations reinvented themselves. In this context, the term of resilience as become a buzz word to describe this shift. Resilience has mainly been considered through the lens of the capacities of organizations to adapt and innovate, yet the literature offers few understandings of what happens during a resilience process from a cognitive perspective. Among the variety of cultural organizations, this paper offers a focus on festivals as their offer deeply relies on the physical gathering of both publics and artists. During the pandemic, most festivals audiences have seen their business models disrupted and turned their services into digital formats or cancelled their editions and constitute then an interesting panel of forms of resilience. Based on a longitudinal study (pre-covid, covid, post-covid periods) we propose an in-depth analysis of the evolution of Montreal festivals' business models. The study is supported with primary qualitative data: 8 interviews with Montreal festivals' managers and secondary data shared by the managers or found online: annual reports, internal documentation, communication elements. We propose, in a first time, to mobilize the notion of business model as a tool for identification and measurement of organizational resilience by emphasizing its phenomenal character. Then we offer a comparison between the different festivals to develop a comprehensive model of their resilience drivers. Our results show that there is a near-unanimous trend for festivals towards a return to pre-pandemic formats and business models, despite the deployment of a large range of innovation. The mains drivers that shape the evolution in business models of festivals are its role and its purpose to which we provide an empirical conceptualisation. It opens a more general discussion on the drivers of innovation in crisis situations for organizations.