Cultural Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Potential through Value Creation

This thesis explores the challenges and opportunities of cultural entrepreneurship, exploring current conceptualisations of cultural entrepreneurs and to find new perspectives and recommendations for cultural entrepreneurs of the future. Cultural entrepreneurship is a contested, yet essential aspect of the growth of artists and arts organisations globally. Though there are similarities, this research demonstrates that cultural entrepreneurs from different backgrounds, industries and of varied sizes need different things and have different barriers so cannot be understood in the same way. Digital technologies and local networks do offer new possibilities for innovation however these are limited in scope and require further investigation and investment. Despite psychological, political and financial barriers to entrepreneurship in the creative industries, finding a balance between artistic, social, economic and institutional innovation for the various actors throughout the arts offers key insights to how artists and arts organisations can be more entrepreneurial. Through a grounded theory approach, this research connects previously disparate fields of cultural policy, social entrepreneurship and business model innovation to derive new perspectives of how cultural entrepreneurs can survive and thrive in the dynamically shifting world. Themes that emerged through the data analysis connect in new ways to Cohendet et al.’s (2012) ‘Anatomy of a Creative City’, outlining the underground, middleground and upperground actors; Albinsson’s (2017) theories of the quadruple bottom line in the creative industries; and a value ecosystem’s approach with a focus on value creation (Allee, 2002; Curtis, 2017). From this combination of literature and data collected, a novel approach to understanding cultural entrepreneurs emerges, creating a model to understand more holistically how value is created and captured for the artist or arts organisation. This model has a range of practical approaches intended to provide tangible pathways into combining the concepts of the quadruple bottom line, value ecosystems and different conceptualisations of cultural entrepreneurs, offering a novel contribution to all of these fields in addition to, and most significantly the topic of cultural entrepreneurship.