What makes a cultural entrepreneur? First, we should clarify the characteristics of entrepreneurship. The popular press and television programmes such as Dragon’s Den usually define it as starting new business ventures. Fillis and Rentschler portray it as “creating value…by bringing together unique combinations of public and private resources to exploit economic, social or cultural opportunities”¹ According to them, the essential capabilities of entrepreneurship are:

• innovation
• risk-taking
• pro-activeness

Cultural entrepreneurs are people who work in the creative and cultural industries and establish an enterprise focusing on media, design, music, film, fashion or other related sectors. But what distinguishes cultural entrepreneurs from the classic entrepreneurial model?
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1. Fillis, I. and Rentschler, R. (2006) Creative Marketing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p10 [↩]

Over the next weeks this blog will have multiple authors from the MA Media Enterprise Course¹. Students on the Cultural Entrepreneurship module² have to write a profile about an entrepreneur.

 Their posts should start appearing here very soon.

1. at Birmingham City University [↩]
2. there are about 20 of them [↩]

You’ll find plenty of blogs listed throughout this site but a colleague of mine at Birmingham City University has a particularly useful one charting her progress as she goes about her job researching in this area.

Her ‘main’ blog, Creative Enterprise is worth a read as is her ‘personal’ blog.