The role of balanced centricity in the Spanish creative industries adopting a crowd-funding organisational model

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the structures of the relationships between actors in the creative industries sector using crowd-funding, and how co-creation is the basis for reaching balanced centricity in the creative industries.

The Many-to-Many Marketing Theory, Service-Dominant Logic and Service Logic are the theoretical bases for explaining how the changing roles of the actors in the creative industries sector have given the crowd a great capacity for deciding in the value-creation process. A qualitative, case-based approach is used, given the complexity of the phenomenon to be analysed.

The findings of the empirical approach have important theoretical and practical implications. On the theoretical side, it analyses the importance of balanced centricity instead of customer centricity as the basis for system stability. Findings also have implications for service managers, as this can be considered an alternative for certain business projects, especially in the creative industries sector, where a growing demand is identified, not only as a method of financing, but also as a strategy for strengthening the bond with customers.

The study has implications for practitioners and scholars. With respect to managers, the “balanced centricity in cultural crowd-funding” model constitutes a significant contribution, because it replaces the prominent position which until now has been enjoyed by the consumer, with the overall balance of the system, in other words, with aiming to benefit all agents. This translates into a change in how strategies are understood and applied in organisations, as in every decision organisations will have to keep in mind the implications that their decisions and actions have on the rest of the agents, with the objective of managing to exploit their “strategic potential”. Strategic planning actions are identified.

This paper is the first to analyse balanced centricity as the basis for system stability in the creative industries. The new tasks of the customer as a selector and financer of projects increase the roles assigned to the co-creation concept and improve the knowledge of Network Theory for the creative industries.