Ollie Leggett is the director and founder of IE Design, based in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, West Midlands. IE Designs main focus and strengths are web, interactive media, design and brand identity. Currently IE Design employ 14 people and have a client list of mainly high value based companies with a concentration on education and charity based organisations.

Ollie displays characteristics of a cultural entrepreneur by having an individual, collaborative and holistic approach to work, motivated by solving problems and being a servant leader. He has learnt new skills in producing and managing creativity throughout his career, mainly project based work for clients and has managed risk by concentrating on a 20% profit margin dropping clients who do not produce that kind of margin. Ollie’s company is involved in the majority of time, in producing and distribution of his client’s commissions especially around web based projects. IE Design developed a management system for themselves which they then marketed as periscope, an online creative management system for creative enterprises becoming producer and consumer or rather in this case consumer-producer, a trait of a cultural entrepreneur. Ollie foresaw 7 years ago, that interactive and online services would be the way to go and so brought on board Oliver Westmancote, as a company director. Seeing and predicting market needs is a distinct trait of an entrepreneur. (Southam et al, 2005)

Ollie Leggett is a cultural entrepreneur because he inspires artistic leadership in those that work for him in small teams and understands the creative process so managing it effectively to create an economically viable, high culture and value based company that produces visual media in print, interactive or web based output. ‘Forming such a business is not only an economic but also a creative act, for it involves shaping a complex cultural web of identity, relationships, communication, language and technology.’ (Rae, 2007: 194) It could be said from the previous quote, that Ollie Leggett demonstrates this with his management and business leadership service to his customer and employees.

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Rai Jenkins