Abstract
This study analyses how carnival museum integration affects multi-stakeholder value creation in tourism microenterprises in Barranquilla, Colombia. Examining 52 enterprises partnering with the Carnival Museum (2021–2023), we tested four hypotheses addressing enterprise financial value, tourist experiential value, museum institutional value and community cultural value. Three value creation models emerged: cultural immersion (85.3 per cent integration), mixed cultural (64.7 per cent) and traditional tourism (34.8 per cent). Results supported all hypotheses. Cultural immersion enterprises achieved 79.2 per cent success rates and $5,840 average revenue, delivered superior tourist experiences (4.62 satisfaction, 4.53 knowledge gain), generated greater museum value (869 annual visits) and stronger community identity reinforcement (4.47 ratings). Museum visit frequency emerged as the strongest financial predictor (β = 0.428, p < .001). Robustness checks, including propensity score matching, fixed-effects analysis and instrumental variables, provided evidence consistent with a causal interpretation. Findings demonstrate that authentic carnival museum integration creates concurrent value across multiple stakeholder groups.
Keywords
Introduction
Cultural heritage tourism plays a significant role in shaping local economic development, with small tourism enterprises acting as key drivers of sustainability and inclusive growth. In Barranquilla, Colombia, the integration of the Carnival Museum into tourism services offers a valuable setting to examine how cultural institutions influence microenterprise performance. This study analyses 28 tourism microenterprises registered with the Chamber of Commerce of Barranquilla that incorporate museum visits into their service offerings, using financial and operational data from 2021 to 2023 to assess how variation in museum integration intensity relates to business sustainability while accounting for seasonal dynamics and business model differences. The study contributes to value creation theory by empirically examining whether Carnival Museum integration produces simultaneous value across multiple stakeholder groups rather than redistributing value among them. While Lepak et al.’s (2007) multi-level framework distinguishes individual, organizational and societal value, empirical research has largely focused on single-level outcomes, particularly firm financial performance, leaving unresolved the value creation–value capture dilemma identified by Bowman and Ambrosini (2000). Addressing this gap, the study operationalizes four stakeholder-specific value dimensions—enterprise financial value, tourist experiential value, museum institutional value and community cultural value—and tests whether deeper museum integration is associated with positive outcomes across all dimensions simultaneously, providing evidence relevant to service-dominant logic and multi-stakeholder value co-creation as articulated by Vargo and Lusch (2016), particularly in a developing-economy cultural tourism context.
Literature Review
This literature review follows a systematic approach aligned with PRISMA guidelines (Page et al., 2021) to ensure transparency, minimize selection bias and capture theoretical pluralism in research on cultural heritage tourism and microenterprise development as presented in Figure 1. Searches conducted in Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar for studies published between 2016 and 2024 yielded 1,247 records, which were screened through title and abstract review, full-text methodological assessment and thematic relevance evaluation, resulting in a final corpus of 89 studies coded by theoretical framework, methodological approach, geographic context and stance on the heritage–tourism relationship, with strong inter-rater reliability. The review identifies three dominant theoretical streams—value creation and stakeholder theory, cultural tourism and heritage preservation studies and microenterprise development research—while also incorporating critical per- spectives from political economy and critical heritage studies that document risks of commodification, uneven benefit distribution and community displacement. By integrating supportive, critical and contingent findings, the review establishes a balanced theoretical foundation that situates the present study within ongoing debates about whether and under what conditions carnival museum integration generates equitable, multi-stakeholder value rather than extractive or asymmetrical outcomes.
Literature.
Value Creation Theory: Multi-level and Multi-stakeholder Foundations
The systematic review reveals three patterns that inform the study’s theoretical positioning and research design. First, value creation theory and stakeholder theory dominate the literature, accounting for 56.2 per cent of reviewed studies, while critical perspectives such as critical heritage studies and political economy represent 30.3 per cent, indicating substantial theoretical pluralism rather than consensus. Second, findings are divided between supportive (53.9 per cent), critical (23.6 per cent) and contingent (22.5 per cent) positions regarding heritage–tourism relationships, suggesting that outcomes depend on governance structures, power dynamics and implementation quality rather than being inherently positive or negative. Third, while quantitative methods predominate (44.9 per cent), qualitative (28.1 per cent) and mixed methods (27.0 per cent) approaches remain significant, justifying the present study’s mixed-methods design. Within this plural landscape, the study draws primarily on Lepak et al.’s (2007) multi-level value creation framework, Freeman’s (1984) stakeholder theory and its extensions (Mitchell et al., 1997), service-dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2016) and the resource-based view, integrating these perspectives to analyze how museum integration may generate individual, organizational and societal value simultaneously.
Critical Perspectives and Alternative Theoretical Frameworks
Critical scholarship challenges assumptions that Carnival Museum integration automatically generates equitable value. Post-colonial tourism theory highlights how tourism may reproduce colonial power relations through cultural commodification (Tucker & Akama, 2009), while critical heritage studies question whether tourism-driven preservation serves community needs or external demands for performative authenticity. Political economy approaches further emphasize how tourism benefits may accrue disproportionately to external investors and local elites, marginalizing communities, as documented in Colombian community-based tourism contexts (Rocca & Zielinski, 2022). Additional critiques emerge from dependency theory and choice-experiment valuations showing divergent stakeholder preferences and potential value conflicts (García-Jácome et al., 2024), as well as studies on value co-creation tensions at heritage attractions (Mijnheer & Gamble, 2019) and museums’ role as public club goods limiting community access (Gómez-Zapata et al., 2018). Rather than marginalizing these critiques, the present study incorporates them directly through measurement choices, model comparison and causal strategies designed to address commodification risks, power asymmetries and selection bias.
Tourism Microenterprise Development: Integrative and Critical Analysis
Research on tourism microenterprise development demonstrates that Carnival Museum integration produces heterogeneous outcomes shaped by institutional support, power relations and resource access. Studies on creative tourism, governance and sustainability highlight how small enterprises adapt through cultural integration while balancing development and preservation pressures (Duxbury et al., 2020; Kalvet et al., 2020; Lak et al., 2020; Mandić & Kennell, 2021; Scheyvens et al., 2021; Terkenli & Georgoula, 2021; Walker et al., 2021). However, research also identifies institutional, financial and structural constraints affecting cultural enterprises and local communities (Fontalvo & De La Puente, 2023; Matekenya et al., 2021; Megeirhi et al., 2020; Rico et al., 2024; Uduji et al., 2021; Ullah et al., 2022), reinforcing the need for empirically grounded, context-sensitive analysis.
Stakeholder Theory Application and Value Co-creation Dynamics
Contemporary applications of stakeholder theory emphasize dynamic, network-based value co-creation rather than linear supplier–customer relationships (López-Guzmán et al., 2023). Building on Freeman’s framework, this literature recognizes that stakeholder salience varies across contexts and over time, particularly in cultural tourism where tourists, enterprises, museums and communities pursue distinct but interdependent objectives. Service-dominant logic frames enterprises as orchestrators of collaborative value creation processes, yet empirical evidence highlights persistent challenges related to power imbalances and conflicting value definitions. Regional studies in Colombia underscore both success factors for small business development and institutional constraints that limit collaborative value creation (De la Puente Pacheco et al., 2024; Lugo et al., 2024). These gaps motivate the present study’s focus on multi-stakeholder measurement and model comparison to assess whether museum integration enables genuine co-creation or reinforces asymmetries.
Synthesis: Theoretical Streams, Identified Gaps and Study Contribution
Synthesizing the literature reveals three intersecting streams—value creation theory, heritage tourism studies and microenterprise development—each offering insights but leaving critical gaps. Value creation research rarely examines simultaneous value generation across stakeholders (Bowman & Ambrosini, 2000; Lepak et al., 2007; Vargo & Lusch, 2016), heritage tourism studies often separate supportive and critical perspectives and microenterprise research under-theorizes cultural heritage as a contested yet strategic resource. Addressing these gaps, the present study operationalizes four value dimensions and identifies three value creation models—cultural immersion, mixed cultural and traditional tourism—emerging from the intersection of these streams. By linking theoretical frameworks directly to research hypotheses and employing rigorous empirical strategies, including causal robustness checks, the study contributes nuanced evidence on when and how Carnival Museum integration creates multi-stakeholder value versus reproducing inequalities or commodifying cultural traditions.
Materials and Methods
Research Design, Questions and Sampling
This study employed a longitudinal observational design spanning January 2021 to December 2023, integrating quantitative performance tracking with qualitative contextual assessment to examine how Carnival Museum integration relates to tourism microenterprise outcomes in Barranquilla, Colombia. The design addressed post-pandemic recovery confounding through pre-2020 baselines, sector benchmarks and seasonal controls; mitigated selection bias using propensity score matching, fixed-effects panel models and instrumental variable estimation; and operationalized multi-stakeholder value beyond revenue by capturing tourist experiential outcomes, enterprise sustainability, museum institutional benefits and community identity reinforcement. Five hypotheses guided the analysis: H1 predicted higher integration would improve enterprise financial performance; H2 anticipated enhanced tourist experiential outcomes; H3 expected greater museum institutional value; H4 posited stronger community cultural value (with acknowledged reliance on tourist-assessed indicators) and H5 tested whether integrated enterprises exhibit greater seasonal resilience. The sampling frame comprised formally registered tourism microenterprises meeting size, continuity and cultural focus criteria, yielding 52 participants (65 per cent of 80 eligible firms) drawn from Chamber of Commerce and museum partnership records, with variation in business type, location, ownership and owner education enabling control for human-capital and geographic confounders. A limitation of this study is that community cultural value is assessed through tourist-reported perceptions; direct community-led evaluation, while essential for validating community-level impacts, lies beyond the scope of the present analysis and is left for future research.
Data Collection, Measurement and Analytical Strategy
Data collection combined standardized monthly revenue reporting (converted to $ using Banco de la República rates), operational indicators (customer volume, pricing, return rates and seasonality), post-experience customer surveys and repeated semi-structured interviews with all owners at three time points (2021, 2022, 2023). Museum integration—the primary independent variable—was measured via average monthly museum visit frequency and the share of customers in integrated experiences, validated through museum ticketing records cross-checked with enterprise logs (96.3 per cent concordance). Tourist experiential value was captured through mobile surveys (5-point Likert) assessing satisfaction, cultural knowledge gain, identity connection and recommendation likelihood (4,847 responses), complemented by observable social media engagement. Economic sustainability—the primary outcome—was measured using monthly revenue and a composite success indicator combining cash-flow viability, operational continuity and customer retention. Mediators included customer return rates and digital engagement, while controls covered business age, owner education, staff size, location, seasonal dummies, pre-pandemic revenue, digital marketing capacity and sector recovery rates. This measurement and modelling framework supported hypothesis testing across financial, experiential, institutional and community dimensions while strengthening causal interpretation and enabling assessment of seasonal resilience.
Results and Discussion
Overview of Analytical Approach
The results follow a progressive, hypothesis-driven structure. Table 1 summarizes the literature review foundations, Table 2 presents descriptive statistics and sample characteristics, Table 3 reports seasonal performance patterns, Table 4 compares outcomes across the three value creation models and Table 5 summarizes multi-stakeholder value results. Together, these tables support the subsequent hypothesis testing and causal analyses. The final stage strengthens causal interpretation through robustness checks, including propensity score matching, fixed-effects panel analysis and instrumental variable estimation. This staged approach allows transparent evaluation of multi-stakeholder value creation while acknowledging the observational nature of the data and prioritizing financial outcomes in line with the study’s core research question and the availability of consistent longitudinal performance data.
Descriptive Statistics and Sample Characteristics
Across the 52 tourism microenterprises observed from January 2021 to December 2023, the mean monthly revenue was $4,520 (SD = $1,175), reflecting the small-scale nature of the sector but also substantial heterogeneity, with revenues ranging from $2,250 to $8,450 and a coefficient of variation of 26.0 per cent. Museum integration likewise exhibited wide dispersion, with an average of 46.3 monthly museum visits per enterprise, ranging from 14 to 92 (SD = 14.2), providing sufficient variation in the key explanatory variable to support regression and causal analyses. This heterogeneity in both financial performance and integration intensity underpins the empirical strategy, enabling meaningful assessment of how differing levels of Carnival Museum integration relate to economic, experiential, institutional and community outcomes across enterprises.
Descriptive Statistics for Key Study Variables (2021–2023).
Package pricing averaged $38.4 (SD = $10.8), ranging from $22 to $68, indicating clear market segmentation and differentiated positioning among microenterprises, while monthly customer volume averaged 128.5 (SD = 41.7; range 48–295), reflecting substantial variation in scale and market reach. Customer return rates averaged 30.4 per cent (SD = 7.8 per cent; range 16.2 per cent–45.6 per cent), demonstrating meaningful differences in loyalty-building capacity and customer satisfaction was generally high (M = 4.36/5.0), with cultural knowledge gain also strong (M = 4.28), suggesting that museum-integrated experiences delivered both experiential and educational value. Social media engagement averaged 42.3 per cent, indicating significant organic visibility effects. Seasonal analysis showed pronounced demand concentration, with high-season revenues averaging $6,240 compared to $2,940 in low season, alongside sharply higher museum integration (72.4 vs 24.6 monthly visits), highlighting the centrality of carnival-related cultural heritage to both performance and integration dynamics.
Seasonal Performance Metrics by Tourism Period (2021–2023).
Customer volume displayed strong seasonal concentration, with enterprises serving an average of 192.3 customers per month in high season versus 67.8 in low season, while mid-season performance remained moderate, underscoring the operational strain created by Barranquilla’s carnival-driven demand cycles. In contrast, customer return rates were comparatively stable across seasons, declining only from 34.6 per cent in high season to 26.8 per cent in low season, suggesting consistent service quality and the stabilizing role of repeat customers during off-peak periods. Against this seasonal backdrop, three value creation models were identified, with the cultural immersion model—28.8 per cent of the sample and averaging 85.3 per cent museum integration—achieving the strongest outcomes, including $5,840 in monthly revenue, a 79.2 per cent success rate and customer satisfaction of 4.62, reflecting the performance advantages of positioning carnival heritage as the core of the tourism value proposition rather than an optional add-on.
Value Creation Model Classification and Characteristics (2021–2023).
Qualitative and quantitative evidence show a clear graduated pattern of strategy and performance across the three value creation models. Cultural immersion enterprises positioned themselves as cultural ambassadors, integrating museum visits into most experiences (85.3 per cent) and prioritizing education alongside commercial goals, which corresponded to the highest satisfaction (4.62), monthly revenue ($5,840) and success rates (79.2 per cent). Mixed cultural enterprises, the largest group (44.2 per cent), adopted a balanced strategy (64.7 per cent integration) combining museum visits with gastronomy, music, architecture and artisan activities, achieving intermediate outcomes ($4,620 monthly revenue; 72.4 per cent success; satisfaction 4.29) that reflect a pragmatic balance between authenticity and diversification. Traditional tourism enterprises maintained limited integration (34.8 per cent), focusing on service breadth and achieving lower but still viable performance ($3,460 monthly revenue; 57.9 per cent success; satisfaction 4.08), indicating that deep integration is beneficial but not essential for sustainability. Statistical tests confirmed this stepwise relationship, with significant differences in success rates (χ² = 8.74, p = .013) and revenue (F = 18.42, p < .001; η² = 0.392), alongside parallel gains in non-financial value such as cultural knowledge acquisition (from 4.08 to 4.53), demonstrating that museum integration enhances economic, experiential and educational outcomes progressively rather than through threshold effects.
Multi-stakeholder Value Creation by Business Model (2021–2023).
Enterprise, institutional and community value increased progressively with deeper museum integration, reinforcing a multi-stakeholder value creation pattern rather than zero-sum trade-offs. Highly integrated cultural immersion enterprises achieved substantially higher customer return rates (34.8 per cent vs 26.7 per cent for traditional tourism), translating into significant customer lifetime value advantages—approximately $7,400 per 100 initial customers over 5 years—while simultaneously reducing acquisition costs through repeat purchases and word-of-mouth effects. Institutional value followed a similar gradient, with highly integrated enterprises delivering an average of 869 annual museum visits compared to 296 among less integrated operators, generating roughly $4,600 in additional annual entrance-fee revenue per partnership alongside non-financial benefits such as audience diversification, educational mission extension and greater operational predictability. Community value also scaled with integration intensity, as reflected in stronger identity-connection ratings (4.47 for cultural immersion vs 3.94 for traditional tourism), indicating enhanced cultural pride, external validation and incentives for cultural continuity. Econometric results confirmed that museum integration explains a substantial share of variation in economic sustainability (R² = 0.768; F = 29.6; p < .001), with museum visit frequency emerging as the strongest revenue predictor (β = 0.428; p < .001) and effects operating primarily through customer satisfaction and loyalty rather than direct channels. Longitudinal analysis further showed that highly integrated enterprises significantly outperformed regional tourism growth during the post-pandemic recovery (64.5 per cent vs 29.3 per cent), with advantages that compounded over time, supporting the conclusion that authentic cultural integration generates durable, multi-dimensional value across enterprises, institutions and communities through experience-quality and loyalty-driven mechanisms.
Discussion
The findings advance theory on multi-stakeholder value creation in cultural tourism by demonstrating that Carnival Museum integration can generate synergistic, rather than zero-sum, outcomes across tourists, enterprises, museums and communities. Cultural immersion enterprises simultaneously achieved superior financial performance ($5,840 average monthly revenue; 79.2 per cent success rate), stronger tourist educational outcomes (knowledge gain of 4.53), greater museum institutional value (869 annual visits per partner) and enhanced community identity reinforcement (4.47), challenging assumptions that financial performance requires sacrificing cultural or social value. Mediation analysis provides empirical support for service-dominant logic by showing that integration affects revenue primarily through customer satisfaction and loyalty, indicating that value is co-created through experiential quality rather than delivered through direct transactional mechanisms. By identifying three value creation models with varying performance levels, the study specifies boundary conditions and contingencies, showing that while deeper integration yields superior multi-dimensional value, it is an enhancement rather than a prerequisite for viability, as evidenced by traditional tourism enterprises achieving a 57.9 per cent success rate with limited integration. These findings extend Lepak et al.’s (2007) multi-level value creation framework by empirically demonstrating simultaneous individual-, organizational- and societal-level value creation, while also engaging critical perspectives by acknowledging power asymmetries, commodification risks and contextual constraints that shape when and how Carnival Museum integration produces sustainable advantages.
Practical Implications and Policy Recommendations
Evidence-based Guidelines for Multi-stakeholder Value Creation
The findings provide concrete, evidence-based guidance for tourism microenterprises, cultural institutions and policymakers seeking to foster multi-stakeholder value creation. For microenterprises, results show that progressive museum integration generates superior outcomes without requiring abrupt business model transformation. Museum visit frequency emerged as the strongest predictor of revenue (β = 0.428), while mediation analysis confirmed that integration effects operate primarily through customer satisfaction and loyalty (indirect effects of 0.208 and 0.201), underscoring the importance of experiential quality over integration volume. The graduated performance across value creation models—from traditional tourism (34.8 per cent integration; 57.9 per cent success) to mixed cultural (64.7 per cent; 72.4 per cent) and cultural immersion (85.3 per cent; 79.2 per cent)—demonstrates that enterprises can deepen heritage engagement incrementally, with each step yielding measurable improvements rather than forcing binary strategic choices.
Policy Considerations for Equitable Value Distribution
For museums and policymakers, the evidence highlights the need for structured partnership frameworks and targeted policy interventions that address structural inequalities shaping integration capacity. Cultural immersion partnerships delivered substantially higher institutional value (869 annual visits; $6,952) than traditional tourism arrangements (296 visits; $2,368), supporting tiered museum–enterprise partnerships that combine broad access with enhanced support for high-quality cultural interpretation. Instrumental variable and regression analyses show that geographic proximity (first-stage F = 19.2) and owner education (β = 0.156) significantly condition integration intensity and performance, indicating that benefits concentrate among already-advantaged operators unless barriers are reduced. Policy responses should therefore prioritize cultural microcredit, mobile and digital training programmes and investments in digital infrastructure to democratize access to heritage-based tourism opportunities.
While outcomes across stakeholders are broadly positive, critical attention to power asymmetries, cultural commodification and dependency risks remain essential. Although community identity reinforcement scores were high (mean 4.20, rising to 4.47 for cultural immersion enterprises), deeper integration may intensify pressures toward performative authenticity, selective representation and spatial concentration of benefits near major cultural institutions. Strong reliance on museum integration also creates vulnerability should institutional priorities shift, while peripheral enterprises face higher coordination costs despite potentially strong community ties. Consistent with critical heritage and political economy perspectives, the findings indicate that multi-stakeholder value creation is contingent rather than automatic, requiring participatory governance, benefit-sharing mechanisms and safeguards ensuring community control over cultural representation to prevent extractive or inequitable outcomes.
Limitations and Future Research
This study is subject to several limitations that constrain generalizability and causal interpretation. The empirical context—Barranquilla, Colombia and the Carnival Museum—is highly specific, limiting direct transferability to other cultural institutions, destinations or governance settings and the sample of 52 formally registered microenterprises, while covering most eligible firms, remains modest for complex statistical modelling. Although multiple robustness checks were applied, the observational design cannot fully rule out unmeasured confounding or selection bias, particularly since enterprises opting into museum integration may possess latent advantages unrelated to heritage engagement. The focus on formal enterprises may underrepresent informal operators prevalent in developing economies and measurement challenges persist due to partial reliance on self-reported data, potential social desirability in tourist surveys and the difficulty of quantifying intangible outcomes such as cultural preservation and identity reinforcement. Future research should therefore pursue comparative, multi-country studies, extend observation windows beyond 5 years, incorporate ethnographic and participatory methods to centre community perspectives and examine governance structures, digital tools and standardized yet context-sensitive frameworks for measuring multi-stakeholder value creation.
Conclusions
This study advances multi-stakeholder value creation scholarship by providing integrated theoretical, empirical, methodological and practical contributions to cultural tourism research. Empirically, the findings demonstrate that deeper Carnival Museum integration—particularly through the cultural immersion model—is associated with superior outcomes across enterprise financial performance, tourist experiential value, museum institutional benefits and community cultural identity reinforcement, supporting extensions of Lepak et al.’s (2007) multi-level value creation framework and service-dominant logic’s emphasis on value co-creation. Methodologically, convergent evidence from propensity score matching, fixed-effects panel analysis and instrumental variable estimation strengthens confidence in the observed relationships while maintaining appropriate caution regarding causality. Substantively, the identification of three value creation models illustrates that multiple strategic pathways can achieve viability, though deeper and more authentic integration consistently yields stronger multi-dimensional outcomes. Practically, the results offer actionable guidance for microenterprises, museums and policymakers seeking to leverage cultural heritage for inclusive economic development, while the explicit acknowledgement of power asymmetries, commodification risks and measurement limitations underscores that positive outcomes are contingent on deliberate governance, community participation and equitable benefit distribution rather than automatic consequences of heritage integration.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Carnival Museum staff, participating microenterprise owners, and the Chamber of Commerce of Barranquilla for their support throughout this research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (Mario de la Puente) upon reasonable request.
Ethical Approval
This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Universidad Del Norte Department of Research (approval code: ETH-2021-0134).
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by Education for All Online under grant 10-15-4.
