With the focus on Entrepreneurial Strategies, we address how organisations of the Creative Economies create value. We are thus expanding the traditional and, in our view, incomplete discussion on business models: it is about more than business!
On the one hand, we are oriented towards the students: the Z-Kubator supports ZHdK artists, designers, and mediators at the interface between artistic or design ideas and entrepreneurship. As an advisory and funding body, ZHdK members and graduates have been supported since 2016 in realising their projects, founding companies and organisations, and starting their own careers. The Z-Kubator promotes artistic careers, non-commercial and commercial activities, projects, and start-ups from all ZHdK disciplines by organising mentoring and coaching, providing infrastructure and financial support, and offering versatile networking. This broad spectrum is demonstrated by start-ups, spin-offs, and non-profit organisations from the ZHdK ecosystem that have already been founded.
On the other hand, we are interested in insights with an open and experimental research approach: We investigate the strategies of actors in the creative economies, i.e. the processes and practices through which sustainability is created, future scope for action is developed and entrepreneurial opportunities are created. We are interested in more than the created values per se. The focus is also on how the actors continually create the conditions to produce this value creation, to develop it further, to test it experimentally, ...: that is the "entrepreneurial" aspect of these strategies.
We are currently working on this topic at European level within the framework of the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE). As one of five research labs, we pursue the common goal of developing measures to strengthen the creative economies and their impact in Europe. We also generate knowledge within ELIA – a European network of art academies – for example in the working group on "Careers in the Arts". The international advisory board of the ZCCE is also an important frame of reference for the topic of entrepreneurial strategies.
Within our thematic focus "Entrepreneurial Strategies" we are currently working on five sub-themes:
- Value creation & (E)valuations: What does (artistic and cultural) creation mean in the creative economies as an independent form of value creation, and how are such forms evaluated?
- "Risky Projects" & Uncertainties: What practices and processes do actors in the creative economies develop to deal with uncertainties?
- (Entrepreneurial) Skills: What skills, abilities, competences, and methods do actors in the creative economies need to be able to operate successfully as entrepreneurs - and how are these taught at arts universities?
- Organising & Company Creations: How can creative value creation be organised and financed sustainably and effectively, and what does this mean for processes of "entrepreneuring" and "strategizing"?
- Entrepreneurship in Context: In which specific contexts of the creative economies do entrepreneurial strategies have to prove themselves – what does gaming have to do with theatre, software with art, NFT with crafts, ...?