Entrepreneurship in Culture and Creative Industries

 

"Entrepreneurship in Culture and Creative Industries”, edited by Elisa Innerhofer, Harald Pechlaner and Elena Borin, has been published in 2018 at Springer. Though mainly centered within a European context and perspective of the field, the various authors engage in a wider global discussion of the changing environment of the creative and cultural industries through a socio-economic understanding of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial behavior, and arts-based entrepreneurship. 

 

The book is a collection with contributing authors from across Europe and North America. It is broken down into three parts: 

 

(1) combining creative industries and business issues; 

(2) the value of creative industries for change and development; and

(3) creative industries in the context of regional and destination development. 

 

 

Part one explores grounded, case-based themes surrounding the often neglected introduction of entrepreneurial perspectives within the functions and formats of active arts organizations and companies in and beyond the creative industries. Entrepreneurial themes such as opportunity recognition and behavior (e.g. in the chapter "Culture Based Products: Integrating Cultural and Commercial Strategies” by Chiara Isadora Artico and Michele Tamma) are showcased alongside organizational themes around storytelling ("Entrepreneurial Storytelling as Narrative Practice in Project and Organizational Development: Findings of a Narrative- and Discourse-Analytical Case Study in Switzerland” by Birgitta Borghoff), as well as professionalization ("Professionalization and Dependence on Social Contexts and Professional Scenes: Drafting Your Career in the Sectors of Creative Industries” by Bastian Lange). 

 

These are key aspects of emergent entrepreneurialism within the cultural and creative industries and are useful to understand through case studies of real-world creative organizations. For example, Artico and Tamma present a case study about the opportunity recognition of cultural perfume organizations, which use symbolic and aesthetic capital and utilize the ‘experience culture’ to leverage new ways of engaging with customers. Creative organization also recognize the increase of company focused heritage sites, such as museums, that attract tourists who are looking for authentic experiences. The chapter also discusses the challenges of ‘commodification and poor protection of culture and cultural heritage’. Creative and cultural organizations can alleviate these by strategically utilizing Artico’s and Tamma’s ‘three levels of action’ to maintain cultural authenticity while at the same time adapting to economic changes within their environments.

 

In terms of topicality and applicability, these central issues help to lay a foundation for understanding the many interconnected facets of creative industry organizations and their utilizations of enterprise-activities to scale their business functions while maintaining socio-culturally grounded in the creative economy. This knowledge is important to understand for arts management practitioners, as the authors provide both theoretical and practical insights into the design of business and organizational functionalities for creative organizational use. 

 

As examples, Borghoff attempts to develop a conceptual model for understanding entrepreneurial storytelling by bridging entrepreneurial studies around storytelling with philosophical concepts on praxis and process within the creative industries. Elena Borin, Fabio Donato, and Christine Sinapi in "Financial Sustainability of Small-and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Cultural and Creative Sector: The Role of Funding” position an outline of the complicated relationship and shaky process for creatives attempting to acquire funding from financial institutions. Importantly, the intermixing of these cases provides the reader with a broad range of experiences within the entrepreneurial practices of the creative industries. 

 

 

Part two continues the theme of bridging conceptual knowledge with case-based examples and highlights a critical inclusion from the field of entrepreneurship: value. Thematically, value is approached from a socio-economic perspective, with discussions including Bourdieu’s capitals, as well as Schumpeter’s understanding around value-generation. These are well placed conceptual themes that, along with real-world examples, provide a platform for considering how value may be classified within the creative industries. 

 

In Gesa Birnkraut’s "The New Socio-Cultural Entrepreneurs: At the Crossroads Between Social Enterprises and Arts Entrepreneurship”, the socio-economic perspective highlights the mergence between social enterprises (an emerging sub-field of entrepreneurship studies) and entrepreneurship within the arts sector of Germany. The chapter attempts to hypothesize about how youth volunteerism in the arts creates future socio-cultural entrepreneurs, which arguably may be too soon to do as this hybrid area of knowledge is still very theoretically nascent. However, the chapter and case within it highlight key entrepreneurship and business approaches to the arts, such as a main focus on how entrepreneurial activities manifest from the social capitalization of volunteer work.

 

In parallel, there is a curious undercurrent that inquires how value is conceived and oriented within the creative and cultural industries, and especially within the arts, as a global entity.  In "The Creative Sector’s Cultural and Entrepreneurial Power and Promise”, Shoshanah B. D. Goldberg-Miller and René Kooyman create meaning around the term ‘value’ from a macro perspective by looking at how non-governmental institutions, again mostly European-based, have defined the creative and cultural industries within the ‘creative economy’. As both authors of this chapter are from a US-based institution, the interesting query emerges for me around if (and possibly how) the US could create a set of ‘institutional definitions’ for understanding a US-based creative economy and what challenges would arise from doing such research.  

 

Interestingly, the chapters and cases in this section don’t develop much of a theoretical discussion around the intrinsic and extrinsic purpose of aesthetic value beyond its connection to creative production, despite aesthetic value serving as a foundational element of creative praxis. Thus, one area to further explore would be understanding the exchange of aesthetic value within the economic, symbolic, social, and cultural capitals of entrepreneurs in the creative and cultural industries. This knowledge gap has the potential to build upon the wider discussion of entrepreneurship as part of the creative industries and may contribute theoretical grounding to a growing interest in entrepreneurial and organizational ‘being’ for arts management scholars.

 

 

Part three includes an interesting turn in the book towards exploring the regional confluences of the creative industries and entrepreneurship. This geographical approach uniquely contributes to demystifying creative industries definitions that are often specific to one country. By setting this section apart, the reader is given an in-depth look at cases of arts organizations and how they not only approach entrepreneurial activity but also how they understand it. 

 

In Hristina Mikic’s "Cultural Entrepreneurship and Rural Development: Case Study of Pirot, Serbia”, we are given a deeper contextual look at how value is understood in specific parts of Europe, in this case Eastern Europe. This chapter focuses on an emerging interest in entrepreneurial studies: rural development. Mikic sets out to highlight the specific experiences of rural cultural entrepreneurs, showing that, in rural areas, entrepreneurial activity is central to economic survival and yet is grounded in the social and cultural norms of the geographic ecosystem. In other words, the cultural and social identity of the areas plays an increasingly important role in the value recognition of a cultural enterprise within the community and affects the entrepreneurial orientation of a rural cultural enterprise (such as its ability to create outputs of meaningful community value).

 

Though focused on the European region, it is interesting to see country-specific perspectives of the creative industries. Importantly, the creative industries are a broad-church of cultural and creative activity that is uniquely formed around and of its environment. The contributions in part three do a service for the wider field by highlighting the necessary work needed to understand not only the global aspects of the creative industries, but also how those global influences impact the community-level activity that drives much of the success of the creative economy.

 

 

This book contributes a strong array of academic and practitioner knowledge in the realm of arts management, and the authors highlight the critical emergence of entrepreneurship within the field. Ultimately, it offers a European perspective on the changing socio-economic environment of the creative and cultural industries. Thus, it is recommended for scholars and practitioners alike, who are interested in exploring the unique challenges of the creative industries in Europe. Additionally, there are contributions that would be of interest to those investigating the global macro-perspectives within the sector, such as the ones discussed above highlighting institutional perspectives within a global creative economy. The book offers a critical level of understanding within the field of arts management, while also grounding detailed perspectives and analyses of real-world cases from European arts organizations and cultural institutions, whose experiences may resonate throughout the global field of arts management.