What is an Entrepreneur? What is a Cultural Entrepreneur? Am I an Entrepreneur or could I be considered a Cultural Entrepreneur? Well let’s start with just the entrepreneur as oppose to the cultural entrepreneur. The dictionary definition of an entrepreneur is a person who organises and manages any enterprise, esp. a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. So then what is a cultural entrepreneur, what makes a cultural entrepreneur different from a ‘normal’ entrepreneur?

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Cultural Entrepreneurship Introduction

‘Cultural entrepreneurs’ have made significant contributions to not only the creative and cultural sector but in the main also to the current vitality and health of the
UK’s economic growth, thus gaining an increased amount of recognition in recent years (Wilson and Stokes 2002:37). Not only do ‘cultural entrepreneurs’  according to Leadbeater and Oakley assist in new job creation and the promotion of  social cohesion they provide a new model of creative production which has been made possible through advances in technology mainly concerning the internet and the use of I.T. (Wilson  and Stokes 2002:37). This sounds great but we need to grasp the concept of a cultural entrepreneur, therefore we must first understand the term entrepreneurship. 

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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 [↩]

In this blog I will look at  

• What is entrepreneurship?
• What is an entrepreneur?
• What is a cultural entrepreneur?
• In what way can an entrepreneurial approach lead to success?
• Case Study on David-Louis – Product Designer.
• Case study on James Dyson
• Summary of investigation and conclusion.

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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.

There’s plenty of research out there about the role of enterprise in education but not too much that is specifically about the role of Art, Design and Media education. A study by the Art, Design, Media Subject Centre fills that gap. It’s written in conjunction with NESTA and is full of useful insights into how creative students learn and why that may well make them just that bit more enterprising than many other students.

You can read the whole report here or there’s a summary of it on another blog I write for called Strategy Digested.