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Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts  Volume 4, Issue 2 
http://artivate.org  pp. 11-31 
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Copyright © 2015, the authors      
 
 

WHAT IS ARTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP? TRACKING THE DEVELOPMENT OF ITS 
DEFINITION IN SCHOLARLY JOURNALS 
Woong Jo Chang, Seattle University 
Margaret Wyszomirski, The Ohio State University 
 

Abstract 
 In this study, we investigate the ways in which arts entrepreneurship has been 
operationalized and defined in the literature. We identify eight scholarly journals in arts 
administration and policy, in business administration, and in nonprofit marketing published 
during 2003-2013 and review articles published in these journals. Our review found that the 
scholarly literature on arts entrepreneurship has in fact been quite scarce. We also examine all 
articles in Artivate, a journal that specializes in arts entrepreneurship. Taking the literature as a 
whole, we found a plethora of meanings used in the literature, indicating an, as yet, unsettled 
definition.  We suggest that some analytical clarity can be obtained by grouping the many 
meanings of arts entrepreneurship into five analytical “levels”: Personal Character traits, Goals, 
Strategies, Tactics, and Context. We also suggest a possible general definition: “arts 
entrepreneurship” is a management process through which cultural workers seek to support their 
creativity and autonomy, advance their capacity for adaptability, and create artistic as well as 
economic and social value. This management process involves an ongoing set of innovative 
choices and risks intended to recombine resources and pursue new opportunities to produce 
artistic, economic, and social value. Identifying the emerging clusters from the meanings found 
in the literature, we conclude that to understand arts entrepreneurs, one must focus on the 
innovative combinations of strategy, individual skills, and mindset operating in each case of arts 
entrepreneurship and its context. As arts entrepreneurship is a constant exercise in recombination 
of skillsets, the possibility of flexible recipes begins to reveal what might be regarded as the 
recombinant DNA of arts entrepreneurship. 
 

What is Arts Entrepreneurship? Tracking the Development of its Definition in Scholarly 
Journals 

 Arts Entrepreneurship is a relatively new topic of research in arts management, cultural 
policy, and arts education, as well as a relatively new focus in entrepreneurial research. In arts-
related fields, the topic appears on the program of many scholarly and professional conference 
programs. From the conferences of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE), 
the international conference on Social Theory, Politics and the Arts (STP&A), the International 
Association of Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC), the International Conference on 
Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR), the International Council of Fine Arts Deans (ICFAD) to the 
annual conferences of the League of American Orchestras (LAO), Dance/ USA, and the US 
Association for Small Business & Entrepreneurship (USASBE), arts entrepreneurship has been 
the focus of panel sessions, keynote speakers, and/or affinity groups. The practice has even been 
recognized with the award of a first MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 when musician Claire Chase 
was named a MacArthur Fellow for arts entrepreneurship.  
 In his 2007 article surveying the landscape of higher education offerings, Gary Beckman 
identified 36 institutions that offered courses and/or certificate or degree programs in arts 
entrepreneurship. Writing more recently in 2013, Jason White noted the number had grown to 
60. In 2012, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, an online journal on arts 



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entrepreneurship, was launched. In June 2014, the Society for Arts Entrepreneurship Education 
was established following its inaugural conference in Dallas. Clearly, the subject of arts 
entrepreneurship has become a hot topic. Thus, it is timely to explore how our understanding of 
the subject of arts entrepreneurship has developed. A significant component of the scholarly 
literature concerns arts entrepreneurship pedagogy. While we note these as part of the literature, 
we will not discuss them in detail—that is a subject for another article. Our focus is on the way 
in which literature has operationalized the concept of arts entrepreneurship, thereby presenting 
implicit definitions of the idea.  
  
Identifying the Literature Pool 
 To assemble a broad pool of relevant literature we chose to review all issues of selected 
journals that appeared regularly over the ten-year period between 2003 and 2013. This period 
was selected because 2013 was the most recent year for which online copies of the journals and 
their articles were downloadable from university library holdings and because scholars in arts 
administration broadly share the impression that the literature on arts entrepreneurship is steadily 
growing (e.g., Beckman, 2007; Beckman & Essig, 2012; Rentschler, 2003; Scherdin & Zander, 
2011). Then we moved back ten years to 2003. As we discovered, moving back a decade brought 
us to a cluster of entrepreneurship articles that appeared in the leading arts management journals 
at the very beginning of the decade, likely reflecting the emergence of arts entrepreneurs in 
practice. 
 We identified major groups of regularly published scholarly journals. The first group, 
journals in the fields of arts administration and policy, was selected on the basis of published 
ranking and impact studies, specifically the assessment compiled by Ruth Rentschler and David 
Shilbury (2008), which was “the first internationally accepted ranking in the field of arts 
management” (Rentschler & Kirchner, 2011). This multidimensional rating survey identified 14 
journals using 30 expert informants who ranked each journal according to four quality and 
knowledge use indicators. Four major journals in arts administration and cultural policy received 
top rating scores. These included the Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 
International Journal of Arts Management, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Journal 
of Cultural Economics. We reviewed all articles published in each journal between 2003 and 
2013 to identify those that dealt explicitly with entrepreneurship. 
 A second group of journals treated the subject of entrepreneurship from the perspective 
of business administration. These included the Journal of Business Venturing and 
Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. Both of these received high rankings in the 2011 study by 
Dos Santos, Holsaple and Ye. In addition, we looked at the journal Creativity and Innovation 
Management, understanding that its explicit commitment to creativity (as can be seen in the 
journal’s title and introduction) might make it focus particularly on arts entrepreneurship. We 
reviewed all articles published in these journals over the 2003-2013 decade and identified those 
that discussed entrepreneurship in a setting of the arts, culture, creativity, or any single artistic 
discipline (such as dance, music, opera, theatre, crafts, etc.). 
 Finally, two other likely publication outlets on arts entrepreneurship that are dedicated to 
nonprofit marketing were identified: Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing and 
International Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing. Finding and building 
audiences is a leading subject of concern for arts managers and funders, and there is a stream of 
thinking in the field of arts management that implies marketing and entrepreneurship are closely 



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identified with arts entrepreneurship. Therefore, we were particularly interested in the possible 
role of nonprofit marketing literature in the field of arts entrepreneurship. 
Among the articles published in each of the journals between 2003 and 2013, we selected those 
that self-identified (thru either the title or abstract) an interest in arts entrepreneurship. We also 
did a keyword search within the articles to see whether any additional articles contained a 
discussion of entrepreneurship, even though it did not self-identify the topic as a focal interest.  
 In the next section, we report our findings from this review and present our analysis of 
the conceptual and definitional patterns displayed in the literature. A third section will then 
review all of the articles published in the recently established journal, Artivate: A Journal of 
Entrepreneurship in the Arts, and compare them with the inter-disciplinary literature. 
 
A Decade of Interdisciplinary Arts Entrepreneurship Literature: A Plethora of Definitions 
 The idea of arts entrepreneurship is widely regarded as a fairly recent phenomenon. What 
may have prompted the recent interest? A clue to an answer may be found in the unstable and 
changing environment in which the arts found themselves during the period under study. The 
decade between 2003 and 2013 was characterized by a number of macro-level changes that 
challenged established operating assumptions and practices of artists and arts organizations.  
Repeated economic disruptions destabilized the dynamics of cultural philanthropy. Marketing 
faced a need to adjust to demographic shifts that saw the age of established arts audience 
members increase even as the arts sought to reach younger and more diverse populations. 
Technological developments allowed audiences access to high quality arts experiences from their 
homes and social media revolutionized the ways in which arts marketing reached “born digital” 
generations. Meanwhile, the spread of the concept of the creative industries emphasized the 
economic scale and significance of arts, entertainment, and cultural activities. But this proved to 
be a double-edged sword: it increased policy pressure for stronger earnings performance in a 
globalizing marketplace, while also diminishing support for public subsidies for the fine arts. As 
we will see, all of these developments had a hand in the rise of arts entrepreneurship discourse—
particularly on the topics of change management and arts leadership, as well as new approaches 
to funding and marketing (Wyszomirski & Chang, 2012). 
 
 Nine journals were examined as plausible locations of literature on arts entrepreneurship: 

•  Four leading Journals in arts management and arts/cultural policy 
•  Three leading journals in the general management field specializing in entrepreneurship 
•  Two leading journals in nonprofit, voluntary, or public-sector marketing 

Table 1, following, summarizes the findings from this review.   
  



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Journal 

Total # of 
Articles 

Published 
during 2003-

2013 

# of Articles on 
Arts 

Entrepreneurship 

% of Articles on 
Arts 

Entrepreneurship 

Arts Management & Policy Journals 
Journal of Arts Management, 
Law, and Society 218  10 (+2 educ) 4.59% (5.50%) 
International Journal of Arts 
Management 203 6 2.96 % 
Journal of Cultural Economics 

169 1 0.59% 
International Journal of Cultural 
Policy 300 4 1.33% 

Entrepreneurship Journals 
Journal of Business Venturing 463 

2 0.43% 
Entrepreneurship Theory and 
Practice 432 2 0.46% 
Creativity and Innovation 
Management 267 2 0.75% 

Nonprofit Marketing Journals 
Journal of Nonprofit and Public 
Sector Marketing 203 0 0% 
International Journal of Nonprofit 
& Voluntary Sector Marketing 312 2 0.64% 

Table 1. Journal and Article Pool Reviewed 
 

Journals in Arts Management and Arts/Cultural Policy 
The four arts management/cultural policy journals contained a total of 890 articles 

(excluding book reviews, issue introductions, and tributes to individual scholars). Of these, only 
19 (+2) presented research and analysis focused on arts entrepreneurship. 

The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society (JAMLS) was established in 1969 as 
the Performing Arts Review. In 1982, it changed its name to the Journal of Arts Management and 
the Law; then in 1992, the title was amended to become the Journal of Arts Management, Law 
and Society. Its long publishing history makes JAMLS the oldest scholarly journal in the field of 
arts management and art/cultural policy. In the decade between 2003 and 2013, 218 articles were 
published in JAMLS, of which only ten treated the subject of entrepreneurship and the arts from a 
conceptual and/or definitional perspective. This represented only 4.59% of the total (an 
additional two articles discussed the teaching of arts entrepreneurship).  

Ruth Rentschler edit the Fall 2003 issue, focused on the exploration of arts and 
entrepreneurship. Renthschler was the head of the Dowater School of Management and 



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Marketing at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She was also the acting head of the 
Center for Leisure Management Research. Thus, she brought a business management and 
marketing perspective to the study of arts management. Even more to the point, Rentschler had 
published a book, The Entrepreneurial Arts Leader, in 2002, which focused on cultural policy 
entrepreneurship in response to changes and challenges in government funding of the arts in a 
number of countries across the globe. In her introduction to the Fall 2003 issue of JAMLS, 
Rentschler spoke of the desire to contribute to the development of broad theoretical perspectives 
and declared the topics of entrepreneurial leadership and entrepreneurial organizations as 
innovations in relating to a changing marketplace. The articles included in the Fall 2003 issue of 
JAMLS discussed small for-profit and nonprofit arts organizations, as well as “how arts leaders 
have managed in a complex and changing environment, while struggling to apply new ways of 
performing human work in a service industry” (Rentschler, 2003, p. 163). The articles ranged 
widely, sought to contextualize entrepreneurship and the arts with regard to cultural policy, 
cultural leadership, cultural value, nonprofit development, leisure activities, and networking 
theory. In short, many conceptual and implementation tools that would come to characterize the 
arts entrepreneurship literature were introduced in this 2003 special issue. 

The Fall 2003 issue of JAMLS clearly demonstrated that scholarly interest in arts 
entrepreneurship at this time was regarded primarily as a form of leadership, the ability to 
manage the recombination of basic organizational functions (such as marketing and funding) in 
the face of contextual change, and as a demonstration of policy entrepreneurship. As such, these 
articles built on two earlier experiments in studying entrepreneurship and the arts – studies by 
Paul DiMaggio (1982) and Margaret Wyszomirski (1987). DiMaggio’s article, “Cultural 
Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston,” was concerned with formative organizational 
leadership at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It raised 
concerns with new organization formation, with cultural leadership, and with manipulating both 
financial and artistic resources in new ways. Alternatively, Wyszomirski’s study of NEA Chair 
Nancy Hanks appeared as a case study chapter in an edited book on policy entrepreneurship and 
leadership innovation in the public sector. It was essentially a case study of policy opportunity 
spotting and new ways of organizing and directing advocacy (which could be regarded as a form 
of policy marketing). 

Thus, the 2003 JAMLS issue introduced an international and broadly descriptive 
definition of arts entrepreneurship. The articles in the 2003 issue dealt with many facets of the 
concept. These included arts consumption patterns and competition (Burton, 2003); leadership 
and regional cultural development (Radbourne, 2003); managing a mixed funding system for arts 
organizations in the U.S. (Mulcahy, 2003); “unraveling” the multiple value propositions of arts 
organizations (Geursen & Rentschler, 2003); music industry networks (Jackson & Oliver, 2003); 
and arts policy leadership in the public sector (Thompson, 2003). Furthermore, the Jackson and 
Oliver article linked music networks to the interest in the creative industries that spread out from 
the UK. 

After the Fall 2003 special issue, entrepreneurship and the arts disappeared from JAMLS 
until a Summer 2007 article by Gary Beckman explored the teaching of arts entrepreneurship in 
higher education. Beckman reported a diversity of curriculum and programmatic approaches 
indicating a weak conceptual foundation amidst growing administrative and student interest. 
Somehow in the years between 2003 and 2007, arts entrepreneurship had developed from a small 
research interest to a much talked about topic among deans of schools of the arts. Beckman 
attributes this interest to “a response to poor professional outcomes, accountability pressures, and 



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the potential for meaningful community engagement [that led to] the development of innovative 
career strategies for arts students” (p. 88). Thus, Beckman returned to the concept of 
entrepreneurship as finding new ways to foster success and new expectations regarding what 
constitutes success in arts education and the professional preparation of artists. Significantly, 
Beckman noted that “there is no consensus on an accepted definition of entrepreneurship in an 
arts context . . . and that the subject arouses resistance among many arts administrators and 
artists from a belief that entrepreneurship represents solely a path toward monetary success at the 
expense of art” (p. 94). 

Between 2009 and 2012, five other articles appeared in JAMLS that touched on arts 
entrepreneurship. In Winter 2009, Aleksandar Brkić published “Teaching Arts Management,” 
identifying four approaches to teaching arts management, one of which was arts 
entrepreneurship. Thus, Brkić’s article falls outside the scope of our current interest, since it is 
concerned with pedagogy rather than research-based conceptualization and definition. However, 
his inclusion of entrepreneurship as one of four main approaches to arts management is 
indicative of how arts entrepreneurship has become a commonly discussed topic in the field. In 
Spring of 2009, Pier Luigi Sacco and colleagues discussed fostering local entrepreneurship as a 
key dimension of local cultural development strategy. While the article also discussed the 
importance of networking, entrepreneurship was treated largely as a development tool for the 
local creative economy, rather than a leadership or innovation approach in its own right. In 2010, 
Christoph Behnke presented a case study of a German Swiss curator of contemporary art in the 
1960s, arguing that curators could be cultural entrepreneurs. Behnke’s idea of entrepreneurship 
emphasized the ability to recombine political, economic, and aesthetic components in a new way 
to navigate a period of significant change. He also identified an entrepreneurial tactic in the way 
rhetoric and symbols are used, which suggested marketing. In 2011, Steven Preece (2011) 
brought up performing arts entrepreneurship (PAE) as a disciplinary micro-culture in the arts. He 
argues that PAE deserves its own theoretical treatment in the literature. Incorporating concepts of 
“The Performing Arts Event Cycle” and the “Performing Arts Value Chain,” the author 
addressed fundamental questions within the PAE subfield such as why, where, and when PAE 
takes place. Finally in 2012, Angela Besana presented an analysis of symphony managers as 
creative entrepreneurs in the sense of constantly finding new approaches to marketing and 
fundraising. Besana’s (2012) article provided an interesting discussion of the entrepreneurial 
tactics of finding new sources of funding as well as new ways of finding and connecting to 
markets. However, it did not really present an entrepreneurial analysis. Rather, it labeled 
orchestra managers as creative entrepreneurs, without clearly defining what this means or how it 
differs from administrative management.   

Additionally, of the six articles that appeared in JAMLS between 2007 and 2013, only one 
dealt with conceptual and/or definitional issues: the Behnke case study. Two (Brkic and 
Beckman) discussed entrepreneurship with a focus on teaching arts management and pedagogy. 
Preece’s article (2011) was focused on the new venture creation aspect of entrepreneurship. Two 
other articles (Sacco, et al. and Besana) essentially labeled certain activities as “entrepreneurial,” 
but did not distinguish them either conceptually or definitionally.  

The Journal of Cultural Economics (JCE) is another well-established publication in the 
field of arts management and arts/cultural policy, having started in 1977. A review of the 169 
articles that appeared in the decade between 2003 and 2013 revealed only one relevant article, 
“The Cultural Entrepreneur and the Creative Industries: Beginning in Vienna” by Swedberg 
(2006), which deals with the definitional and conceptual origins of entrepreneurship as presented 



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by Joseph Schumpeter, that also considered how he applied this discussion to the arts (Swedberg, 
2006). This lone article seems to suggest that while cultural economists might regard arts 
entrepreneurship as a topic within economic theory, they seem less likely to consider it as a 
subject for economic analysis.  

The International Journal of Arts Management (IJAM) published its first issue in the Fall 
of 1998 with a mission to improve information exchange and learning between arts managers 
and academic researchers who were also preparing future generations of arts managers in a 
growing number of academic programs (Colbert, 1998). During our review period, six articles 
appeared discussing arts entrepreneurship: two were focused on arts marketing (one of arts 
organizations and the other of individual artists); another two were concerned with 
organizational leadership and change management; and each of the two final articles either 
discussed opportunity spotting to develop innovative types of arts and business relationships or 
the role of education in preparing musicians for careers as freelancers and in creating start-ups. 

In Winter 2003, Des Griffin published an article about museum leaders as possible 
entrepreneurs. Des Griffin painted a backdrop of extensive change both in the environment 
surrounding museums and in the transformation of museums from “predictable, preachy, white-
walled and academic institutions into more engaged, educational, and entrepreneurial 
organizations committed to building audiences as well as collections” (2003, p. 5). As a result of 
these changes, Des Griffin argued, museum leaders have faced growing expectations to act as 
“superior change managers.” Such entrepreneurialism is held to mean “an increasing focus on 
[their] audiences and on the generation of revenue from beyond the realm of traditional sources” 
(p. 5). Later, Des Griffin reinforced the financial connotation, arguing that any distinction 
between entrepreneurship and innovation has to do with the implication that entrepreneurship 
involves generating money. He pointed out that this produces the expectation that museum 
managers  “[do] more with less or generat[e] more revenues from outside government (or other 
traditional) sources” (2003, p. 10).  He finished with a critique of “the wrong-headedness of a 
focus on the entrepreneurial business model and on efficiency.” 

Later in 2003, IJAM editor Francois Colbert explored entrepreneurship and leadership in 
marketing the arts. The focus on marketing addressed a common concern of entrepreneurs: 
finding new ways to approach and appeal to new markets/audiences. Colbert drew on a broad 
base of marketing knowledge to argue that marketing the arts has particularities that differ from 
other products. It is product-focused, yet the product does not exist to fulfill a market need. The 
established arts market is distinctive and limited, yet diversifying it is an important element of 
leadership. Getting children interested in the arts is “crucially important” (Colbert, 2003, p. 34).  
Entrepreneurship in arts marketing seems to require using common marketing tools such as 
branding, marketing both products and experiences, forging closer community ties, improving 
the level of customer service, and strengthening data collection and processing through new 
technology use. Thus, for Colbert, adapting and recombining well-known marketing tactics to 
the particularities of the arts market was the hallmark of arts entrepreneurship. In contrast, we 
see arts marketing as a key entrepreneurial tactic rather than the entire concept. 

Ian Fillis expanded on the perspective of marketing as entrepreneurship in his 2004 
article on “The Entrepreneurial Artist as Marketer: Drawing from the Smaller Firm Literature” 
published in IJAM.  The focus is on individual artists and artists working as owners of small 
businesses or as sole proprietors.  Heretofore, much of the arts entrepreneurship literature has 
tended to look at arts organizations as the context in which entrepreneurship is practiced. Fillis 
launched a broad critique of conventional marketing strategies as being too logical, too linear, 



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and too uncreative (2004, p. 12). In seeking more creativity in marketing in general, Fillis also 
argued for more creativity and new approaches in arts marketing in particular. By looking at 
small and midsized enterprises (SMEs), rather than large organizations, he linked into the idea 
that entrepreneurship is critical to new and small firms. Furthermore, new and small firms have 
more flexibility and can adapt to change quickly. They also rely on extensive networking, 
including more personalized customer relations, and may be more creative in spotting 
opportunities. Here, Fillis alerted the arts manager as well as the individual artist not only to the 
marketing/entrepreneurship “interface,” but also to a set of elements that included effective 
marketing, artistic creativity, and small arts enterprises. This conceptualization of arts and 
entrepreneurship is broader than seen elsewhere in the literature of this decade, but its 
innovativeness was masked by treating entrepreneurship simply as “marketing” as it was 
assumed to represent the full picture of the concept. 

Finally, in her article, “Arts, Culture and Business: A Relationship Transformation, a 
Nascent Field,” Bernadette McNicholas (2004) explores various forms of cultural 
entrepreneurship to examine the evolution of arts and business relationships from arts 
sponsorships (which she claims are outdated) to different types of strategic arts and cultural 
partnerships and various forms of cultural entrepreneurship, as illustrated by a framework of 
types of arts and business relationships. The author concludes that arts/culture and business 
relationships now act as on-the-edge-innovation systems and dynamic complex adaptive 
relationship systems, offering unique opportunities and powerful economic advantages for 
business and communities in the 21st century. Note that McNicholas (2004) and other authors in 
IJAM use the term, “cultural entrepreneurship” rather than “arts entrepreneurship.” This may be 
because IJAM is more Europe-centric (as well as Canada and Australia) where the term “culture” 
is used more interchangeably with the term “art,” and, therefore, the term “cultural management” 
is used far more frequently to refer to “arts management” than is done in the United States. 

Just like JAMLS, after 2003-2004, articles selected and published by IJAM seldom 
focused on entrepreneurship. However, discussions of the subject could be found in articles 
about specific case studies or regional studies, such as in “Martin Revheim, Blå and the 
Kongsberg Jazz Festival: Suksess Need Not Be Translated” (2006) by Stéphane Vigneault, 
Bernard Chassé, and Laurent Lapierre. This case study examines the work of Martin Revheim, 
director of Norway's very successful Kongsberg Jazz Festival, since 2002. Entrepreneurship in 
this article is discussed as a form of leadership.  

Andrea Hausmann (2010) again touches on the educational problems for arts 
entrepreneurship. In her article “German Artists Between Bohemian Idealism and 
Entrepreneurial Dynamics: Reflections on Cultural Entrepreneurship and the Need for Start-Up 
Management,” Hausmann explores contextual factors in cultural entrepreneurship in Germany, 
especially focusing on start-up arts organizations. Acknowledging the problems with the long-
term economic success of start-ups in the German cultural sector, she finds the existing system of 
music education in Germany to be inappropriate for young artists who will soon engage in 
freelance life or in the management of start-ups to be inappropriate.  

Thus, while IJAM published six articles on arts entrepreneurship during the decade under 
review, the term “entrepreneurship” was largely treated as an asserted, descriptive label and 
therefore escaped clear definition either conceptually or operationally.  

The International Journal of Cultural Policy (IJCP), formerly known as The European 
Journal of Cultural Policy, was first published in 1994, and renamed in 1997. The IJCP focuses 
on exploring the meaning, function, and impact of cultural policies. It discusses “culture” as 



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symbolic communication related to policy at any level rather than a way of life. In the decade 
between 2003 and 2013, 300 articles were published in IJCP, of which four treated the subject of 
entrepreneurship and the arts, representing only 1.33% of the total number of articles.   

The following articles draw attention to various forces of change as prompting a turn 
toward entrepreneurship in the arts. As such, they point to the importance of context and to a 
need to improve change management. Among the changes discussed in Andrea Ellmeier’s 
article, “Cultural Entrepreneurialism” are “the ‘marketisation’ of culture and the ‘culturalisation’ 
of the market” (Ellmeier, 2003, p. 5) – that is, the meeting point of market and culture. To 
respond to these concurrent processes of change, the author calls for “cultural 
entrepreneurialism” (which we term “arts entrepreneurship” in this review) and observes a 
transition from “cultural worker” to “cultural entrepreneur” in the creative sector. Ellmeier 
recognizes new job profiles emerging in the creative cultural sector that fundamentally alter the 
image of artists and creators into cultural entrepreneurs who earn their living from their various 
micro-enterprises. In response to these changes, Robert Hewison, in his article “The Crisis of 
Cultural Leadership in Britain” (2004), calls for new forms of leadership driven not by market 
values, but by the social and public good. As he examines cultural leadership, he sees that 
relational cultural leaders, who work with and through others, will be of more value in the future, 
rather than transformational or transactional leaders. Cultural leadership driven by the social and 
public good stretches the concept of arts entrepreneurship beyond the sustainability of artists and 
arts organizations and extends it to also produce social and public benefits that help to sustain 
civil society.  

In the process of change management, the following two articles question the general 
description of entrepreneurship as a form of “creative destruction” and, instead, suggest that arts 
entrepreneurship might emphasize “creative adaptation.” For instance, in “Manageable 
Creativity,” Chris Bilton (2010) notes how creativity in both theory and practice has become a 
“manageable” rather than a “destructive” concept. The structural model of creativity emphasizes 
the systems and infrastructure of an individual’s creativity, rather than that individual’s raw 
talent and the pure content of his or her creation. However, this approach overlooks the 
unpredictability of artists and their creations, posing an inevitable oxymoron – the belief that the 
creative process can be “managed” and held to a “structured” system through policy, even as its 
practitioners and products remain unpredictable by nature. In their article, “Management Skills 
for Artists: ‘Learning by Doing’?” (2011), Christine Bauer, Katharina Viola, and Christine 
Strauss also consider the shift in the perception of creativity from being “destructive” to being 
“manageable” and the shift from transformational to relational leadership. Consequently, they 
problematize the current training for artists that reflects on those shifts and call for more 
entrepreneurial education that includes business-related content for career development for 
artists.   

 
Journals in the General Management Field Specializing in Entrepreneurship 

Studies regarding the arts and arts organizations have also been scarce in business 
journals that focus on entrepreneurship. Between 2003 and 2013, the entrepreneurship journals 
(Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Creativity and 
Innovation Management) that we reviewed contained a total of 1,162 articles (excluding book 
reviews, issue introductions, and tributes to individual scholars). Of these, only six reported 
research and analysis focusing on arts entrepreneurship.  



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The Journal of Business Venturing (JBV), which has been published since 1986, 
introduced two articles in recent years that discuss the arts or the cultural sector. True to the 
journal’s name, each of these articles focuses on how arts activities try to obtain venture capital.  
In “Nascent Ventures Competing for Start-up Capital: Matching Reputations and Investors” Joris 
J. Ebbers and Nachoem M. Wijnberg (2012) argue that investors cannot know whether a nascent 
venture is worth investing in, since it does not yet have an established reputation; however, 
investors can rely on the past reputations of a venture’s founder based on his/her performance in 
earlier years. Thus the authors studied the reputations of Dutch producers and directors and 
examined their impact on investors. They use Selection System Theory to analyze the impact of 
different types of reputations on the behavior of investors. The professional reputations of 
individual artists play a significant role in securing funding not only from investors, but also 
from public and private donors. This article touches upon arts entrepreneurship to the extent that 
it focuses on investments in new projects in the Dutch film industry.  

In 2013, Paul Belleflamme, Thomas Lambert, and Armin Schwienbacher published 
“Crowdfunding: Tapping the Right Crowd” in JBV. They address how for-profit, artistic, and 
cultural ventures use crowdfunding to raise external financing from a large number of small 
investors, namely the “crowd,” with each person providing a very small amount. This type of 
fundraising is carried out in place of soliciting money from a small number of investors who are 
in a position to make larger contributions. The authors compare two forms of crowdfunding: in 
one, individuals are invited to pre-order a product; and in the other, they are asked to advance a 
fixed payment in exchange for a share of future profits. In both cases “crowdfunders” are 
assumed to enjoy “community benefits.” Belleflamme et al. (2013) used a unified model to 
determine when an entrepreneur chooses one or the other forms of fund raising. They found that 
entrepreneurs pre-order when a relatively small initial capital is required compared with market 
size; otherwise, they engage in profit sharing.   

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ET&P), which has been issued since 1988, 
published two articles in recent years that examine entrepreneurial practices in the arts or cultural 
sector. The first article was “Learning from Levi-Strauss' Legacy: Art, Craft, Engineering, 
Bricolage, and Brokerage in Entrepreneurship.” The authors, Bryan T. Stinchfield, Reed E. 
Nelson and Matthew S. Wood (2013), studied 23 entrepreneurs using grounded theory; they 
were interested in “less ‘rational’ entrepreneurial behaviors” (p. 889). From their findings, five 
types of entrepreneurial behavior emerged: art, craft, engineering, bricolage, and brokerage. 
They then considered the association between these types of entrepreneurship and the financial 
sustainability of the venture.  

Also in ET&P, we found Kristine M. Kuhn and Tera L. Galloway’s (2013) paper, “With 
a Little Help From My Competitors: Peer Networking Among Artisan Entrepreneurs.” The 
authors implicitly challenge the general definition of arts entrepreneurs by focusing instead on 
“artisan entrepreneurs”-- those who sell their arts and crafts through e-commerce sites such as 
Etsy and Artfire. They surveyed 343 artisan entrepreneurs to learn about their uses of technology 
in giving and receiving advice and assistance, both formally and informally, which the authors 
call “soft support” (Kuhn & Galloway, 2013, p. 1). They found that the types of advice and 
support (friendship, creative ideas, or business management, among others) an artisan 
entrepreneur sought, depended on his or her type of motivation (creative-expression and 
business-oriented).   

Creativity and Innovation Management (C&IM), which first appeared in 1992, publishes 
papers that discuss how imagination and innovation are organized and implemented in business, 



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with the goal to reduce the gap between theory and practice. In recent years, two articles were 
published in C&IM that are related to the arts. In “Bring in the Arts and Get the Creativity for 
Free: A Study of the Artists in Residence Project,” Alexander Styhre and Michael Eriksson 
(2008) examine Artists in Residence, a ten-month project conducted in Sweden involving a 
collaboration of musicians, painters, actors, directors, dancers, and choreographers with a regular 
company so that artists would be in touch with the world of business. The goal of the project was 
to “think in new and creative ways” (Styhre & Eriksson, 2008, p. 47). The project showed the 
potential benefits of bringing artists into industry. 

In “A Competence Portfolio for Professionals in the Creative Industries,” Dana Mietzner 
and Martin Kamprath (2013) consider the impact of developments in media and ICT 
technologies on creative industries. Through a literature review, interviews, and workshops with 
industry experts, they investigate trends in what they call “competence shifts.” The authors 
compile a portfolio consisting of professional, methodological, and personal-social competences 
for the creative industries, making recommendations regarding the competences that they felt 
needed to be included in training creative professionals. 

 
Journals in Nonprofit, Voluntary, or Public-sector Marketing 

 After reviewing the other journals in our study, we also decided to look at two leading 
nonprofit marketing journals. Since marketing was one of the most common themes in the arts 
entrepreneurship literature to date, we wanted to inquire whether journals focused on this 
particular meaning of “entrepreneurship” might prove a fruitful source of pertinent articles and 
ideas. Furthermore, since a significant segment of the arts are produced and presented by 
nonprofit organizations, we chose to concentrate on marketing journals concerned with nonprofit 
activity. 
 Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing (JNPSM) was first published in 1996. 
Within the decade that we reviewed, we found eight articles on issues related to the arts sector, 
several articles on social entrepreneurship, with one special issue (2010 Volume 22 issue 2) 
devoted to social entrepreneurship. However, there were no articles in the JNPSM that address 
the subject of arts and entrepreneurship. 
 International Journal of Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Marketing (IJNVSM) also began 
publishing in 1996. Among a total of 312 articles that appeared between 2003 and 2013, the 
journal published 46 articles about the arts; of these, only two (0.64%) address issues in arts 
entrepreneurship. In “Using Creativity to Achieve an Entrepreneurial Future for Arts 
Marketing,” Ian Fillis and Ruth Rentschler (2005) address marketing behavior in non-profit arts 
organizations. They examine how art, marketing, and entrepreneurship are related to creativity – 
that is, how it is necessary to think creatively when managing one’s arts organization to cope 
with the resource constraints. This paper utilizes creativity as a central concept to include a wide 
range of literatures to embrace non-linear, free thinking to solve current issues in arts marketing. 
 In 2006, Ruth Rentschler and Megan Cardmone published “Indigenous Innovators: The 
Role of Web Marketing for Cultural Micro-Enterprises,” in which they discuss arts 
entrepreneurship. Focusing on the indigenous cultural sector in Australia, which annually 
contributes $100 million to the country’s economy, the authors note that most Australian 
indigenous cultural producers are micro-enterprises. Furthermore, due to their remote and 
isolated locations or few resources in urban areas, these micro-enterprises are struggling to 
market their cultural products. Incorporating two case studies, Rentschler and Cardmone discuss 
the innovative uses of information technology, exploring web marketing as a possible solution 



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for the struggling indigenous cultural micro-enterprises (ICME) and assess the attributes of 
effective web marketing. 
 

Designative Patterns in the Scholarly Literature 
 Despite a sense that arts entrepreneurship has been a hot topic in recent years, this review 
found that the scholarly literature on arts entrepreneurship has, in fact, been quite scarce. The 
preceding discussion of nine scholarly journals focused on arts management/policy, business 
journals concerned with entrepreneurship in general, and journals focused on marketing in 
nonprofit and public sectors during the years between 2003 and 2013. Of the number of articles 
reviewed, only 29 (31 including arts entrepreneurship education) arts entrepreneurship articles 
appeared among a total of 2,567 articles published during our period of concern. Although the 
number of articles is relatively small, many different phenomena were identified as exhibiting 
the phenomenon of arts entrepreneurship. Each meaning can be understood as offering at least a 
partial and implicit definition of the term. In other words, our vocabulary is primarily 
designative. The sheer variety of these meanings reinforces the often-noticed lack of consensus 
among researchers about the definition of arts entrepreneurship. 
 Table 2 below lists fifteen meanings of arts entrepreneurship that appeared in the 
literature reviewed. The list is presented in simple alphabetical form. The number of times a 
given meaning appeared in the literature is noted in the left hand column, with an additional 
column noting frequency of use in articles published in Artivate, launched in 2012. Note that the 
number of appearances exceeds the number of articles because many articles address more than 
one manifestation or defining topic. 
 The three most frequently used meanings of arts entrepreneurship refer to common 
business meanings of entrepreneurship: new ventures, locating new financial capital, and 
developing new markets. Similarly, the next most common meanings also appear frequently in 
the general business literature —networking and change management. (Change management is a 
term common to the nonprofit literature. Perhaps the more apposite business term is “creative 
destruction.”)   
 Alternatively, many articles discuss more than one meaning or attribute of arts 
entrepreneurship in a single article. For example, a number of authors who explore arts 
organizational leadership as an exercise in entrepreneurship also argue that such leaders often 
aim to develop new forms of funding and/or new initiatives in audience/market development. 
Other authors who examine arts organization case studies combine leadership, change 
management, and opportunity spotting in the same discussion. Furthermore, organizational 
change is seen as being driven both/either by internal, organizational developments or by 
external, contextual factors. A number of authors touch on a role for new technology use in 
combination with other meanings. Yet other authors, particularly those dealing with individual 
artists and arts micro-enterprises, tend to integrate issues of new venture creation with venture 
capital acquisition (sometimes employing social media such as crowdsourcing) with networking. 
Those dealing with arts entrepreneurship in the public sector seem to emphasize opportunity 
spotting, with contextual sensitivity, networking, and recombination initiatives although such 
cases seldom use explicitly entrepreneurial terminology. 



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Designated Meaning 
 

(N = Total # of meanings discussed) 

7 journals 
reviewed  
(N = 55) 

2 nonprofit 
marketing 
journals (N=5)   

Artivate 

(N = 40) 

Arts Organization Leadership 3 1 -- 

Bricolage -- -- 2 

Change Management 4 -- -- 

Competency/Skills/Education 4 -- 7 

Funding Acquisition 6 -- 1 

Individual Artists/Small Business 11 1 4 

Local/regional Development 2 -- 2 

Marketing/Audience Development 6 -- 2 

Mindset/Personal Traits 2 1 4 

Networking 4 -- 1 

New Technology Use 3 1 2 

Partnerships 1 -- 2 

Public Leadership/Policy Innovation 1 -- -- 

Opportunity Spotting 2 -- 7 

Recombination 2 -- 2 

Social Enterprise 1 1 4 

Theory/Types 3 -- -- 
Table 2. Designated Meanings of Arts Entrepreneurship 
 

Examining the Specialized Literature: Artivate 
 A new scholarly journal – Artivate – dedicated to developing the field discussion and to 
stimulating research on arts entrepreneurship began publishing in 2012. In their introductory 
article for the first issue, co-editors Gary Beckman and Linda Essig (2012) referred to the Journal 
“ …as the first peer-reviewed platform for arts entrepreneurship scholarship originating in the 
U.S…”(p. 7). In the dialogue-structured article, Beckman describes arts entrepreneurship as a 
hybrid of disciplinary inputs and stakeholders, noting that “‘…our product’ is aesthetic, thus, our 
prefix separates us from the business school and our suffix separates us from the arts school, but 
the beauty of our field is that our title unites the two in a new way.”(p. 1) and that “…what 



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Artivate publishes is aimed at assisting scholars, educators, decision and policy makers, 
emerging and working arts professionals, and the public in understanding the field” (p. 7). 
 The article goes on to discuss the emergence of interest in the subject in terms of 
contextual factors—such as the Culture Wars over arts and cultural policy; the impact of a 
changing economic climate on arts funding practices in both the public and private sectors; a 
growing recognition that artists have little practical training in managing their careers or their 
practice; and a search among arts and arts administration educators for better ways to prepare 
their students for professional success in the 21st century. 
 Thus, the very field itself is an example of intellectual entrepreneurship: it recombines 
existing disciplinary elements into a new way to educate future generations of creative workers; 
as an exercise in change management; and as a shift from cultivating “best practices” to fostering 
opportunity spotting and innovation. 
 Given the focus of Artivate, it seems appropriate to compare how it has built upon, added 
to, and differed from the scholarly literature that largely preceded its appearance. Artivate 
published 5 issues between its appearance in 2012 and September of 2014. Each issue had three 
research-based articles which were peer reviewed for a total of 15 articles (Bonin-Rodriguez, 
2012; Lord, 2012; Nytch, 2012; Essig, 2013; Roberts, 2013; Shockley & Frank, 2013; Mathew & 
Carl, 2013; Kolsteeg, 2013; White, 2013; Pollard & Wilson, 2014; Preece, 2014; Webb, 2014; 
Enhuber, 2014; Griffey, 2014; Welsh, Onishi, DeHoog, & Syed, 2014). Issue introductions and 
book reviews were not included in this count. 
 While this gives us a much smaller pool of articles to consider, they were all concerned 
with arts entrepreneurship. This pool generated nearly as many designated meanings (N=50) as 
the larger pool of articles reviewed in the journals the focused on arts administration and policy 
more generally as well as the general business journals on entrepreneurship (N=54) and 
nonprofit marketing (N=5). Looking at Table 2, we can see that the Artivate articles on arts 
entrepreneurship displayed many of the same meanings found in the more general literature 
review. However, a few additional meanings appeared in Artivate—these included bricolage, 
mindset, and social entrepreneurship. Artivate articles were also more likely to focus on two 
topics: 1) relevant competencies and skills as well as how these might be taught to artists and arts 
managers (n=7), and 2) opportunity spotting (n=7). 

 
Moving From Case Studies to a Definitional “Recipe” 

 Taking the literature as a whole, we can now offer a preliminary definition of “arts 
entrepreneurship” as a management process through which cultural workers seek to support their 
creativity and autonomy, advance their capacity for adaptability, and create artistic as well as 
economic and social value. Different combinations of resources can be directed toward different 
value equations and involve different risk calculations. 
 Seeing all these meanings and possible combinations, it would seem that the next step is 
to try to discern patterns or clusters that reduce the variety into a more manageable and 
parsimonious taxonomy. Recognizing the possible basis for the taxonomy should advance our 
understanding of the phenomenon of arts entrepreneurship. This, in turn, could help generate 
explanations and research hypotheses that would guide and facilitate not only practice but also 
pedagogy. Additionally, the fact that case studies seem to exhibit linkages among designations—
such as mindset, new ventures, and opportunity spotting in cases concerned with individual 
artists—also suggests that each designation is not an alternative meaning of arts entrepreneurship 
but rather represents different aspects of the entrepreneurial process.   



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 So, what clusters emerge from the collection of meanings found in the literature 
reviewed? We start with an observation that the literature carries the assumption that 
entrepreneurship is a form of management, and as such, calls on actions, skills, and decisions to 
direct an endeavor to achieve a set purpose. In arts entrepreneurship, this management purpose 
involves an ongoing set of innovative choices and risks intended to recombine resources and 
pursue new opportunities in order to produce artistic, economic and social value. As Joseph 
Schumpeter, the founding theorist of entrepreneurship, has described it, the process recombines 
pre-existing elements of activity in a novel fashion involving a measure of risk (Schumpeter, 
1934). For entrepreneurs in the arts, these risks can be three-fold: creativity risk, market risk, and 
career risk (Tremblay, 2008). Schumpeter argued that the functions of an entrepreneur were to 
reform or even revolutionize production and distribution by being alert to innovations in forces 
around them (e.g., new technology or invention) and changes in their environment (new market 
demographics, access to new markets, new sources of resources, etc.). Furthermore, for products 
of the creative and cultural industries there are also many opportunities for innovative value 
propositions, since they embody multiple types of value—economic and cultural (Throsby, 
2001). 

Table 3. Taxonomy of Arts Entrepreneurship Components 
 

DEFINITION: arts entrepreneurship is a management process through which cultural workers 
seek to support their creativity and autonomy, advance their capacity for adaptability, and create 
artistic as well as economic and social value. 
Arts Entrepreneur Purpose:  the purpose of this management process involves an ongoing set of 
innovative choices and risks intended to recombine resources and pursue new opportunities in 
order to produce artistic, economic and social value. 
Leadership 
Vision 

Leadership 
Tools 

Personal Capacity Personal 
Traits 

External 
Environment 

STRATEGIES TACTICS COMPETENCIES
/SKILLS 

MINDSET 
 

CONTEXT 

- New Ventures 
- Creative 

Enterprise 
- Career 

Portfolios 
- Community or 

Heritage 
Enterprise 

- Social 
Enterprise 

- Change 
Management 

- Intrapreneur 
 

- New 
Marketing 
Approach 

- Audience 
Development 

- New funding 
Source 

- New Funding 
Approach 

- Networking 
- Partnerships 
- Recombination 
- Bricolage 
- New 

Technology 

- Opportunity 
Spotting 

- Business Skill 
Acquisition 

- Professional 
Development: 
Training and 
Education 

- Perseverance 
- Risk-taking 
- Tolerance of 

Failure 
- 0pen-minded 

- Organization 
- Individual Artist 

or Small 
Business 

- Artistic Field 
- Local/Regional 

Locale 



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 These aspects cluster into five categories of considerations. Table 3 sets out these five 
categories and lists specific examples of each that have appeared in the literature that we 
reviewed. Each instance of arts entrepreneurship embodies a metaphorical “recipe” that includes 
at least one element from each category. Thus, arts entrepreneurship is a constant exercise in 
recombination.  

1) Leadership categories include both strategies and tactics—or ends and means. 
Strategies identify the goals of value creation and the innovative vision. These can 
include new venture creation as independent microenterprises; arts based social 
entrepreneur activities; the creation of new artistic products or services relying on 
imagination; the promotion of policy change through policy entrepreneurship; self-
management of career transitions and the construction of career portfolios; managing 
change by recombination of “recipe” components; the generation of new cultural 
products and services relying on cultural heritage resources. 

2) Tactics indicate the tools or approaches one intends to employ in implementing the 
strategic vision. Much of the research on art entrepreneurship has focused on the 
explorations of tactics—on developing new markets and reaching them in new ways; 
on using Internet and social networks to deliver and promote the distribution of the 
arts via digital technology; on the benefits and processes of cultivating partnerships 
between arts organizations as well as non-arts organizations; on the use of 
crowdsourcing methods of fundraising; and on turning bricolage into an innovative 
production approach. 

 While better understanding of these leadership ends and means tell us how arts 
entrepreneurs can act effectively, they do not help us understand (or teach) how to think 
entrepreneurially. Thus, there are also two categories of personal characteristics that must be 
added into the entrepreneurship “recipe:” Personal capacities and personality traits. 

3) Personal Capacity consists of knowhow (competencies and skills) that effect the 
ability of an entrepreneurial leader to carry out the vision and to use implementation 
tactics. An often identified skill is opportunity spotting which is sometimes treated as 
a kind of intuition. Business skills are another frequently mentioned aspect of 
personal capacity. Sometimes discussions of personal capacity for entrepreneurship is 
discussed in term of how these competencies and skills can be acquired, namely 
through processes of training, education, and ongoing professional development. 

4) Personality Traits and Mindset refers to qualities of character or to ways of thinking 
that are believed to be associated with entrepreneurial behavior. Frequently 
mentioned are being open-minded, perseverance, risk-taking, and tolerance for 
failure. 

5) Finally, entrepreneurship does not take place in a vacuum; it must be sensitive to the 
external environment and conditions that the entrepreneur contends with. These 
external factors provide the context in which entrepreneurship is practiced. Studies of 
arts entrepreneurship generally specify whether the frame is organizational or 
individualistic. Case studies often frame the entrepreneurial setting as dependent on 
the art form at its core, hence stipulating whether a case is set in the performing arts, 
or even more particularly in the field of music, or in museums, or the film industry. 
Another significant contextual frame seems to be the actual community, geographic 
or spatial environment which shows up in explorations of how individual cities or 



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regions seek to foster greater arts entrepreneurship or the development of creative and 
cultural industries. 

With this set of categories, we can begin to understand why individual case studies often 
exhibit an implicit recipe in which a specific strategy (e.g, career portfolios) appears to be 
associated with a particular tactic (e.g. networking), with the acquisition of new (business or 
technological) skills acquired through training or education, by individuals who are risk-takers 
and persevering, and that these cases tend to involve individual artists who are either self-
employed or freelancers.   

To understand such entrepreneurs, one must focus on the innovative combinations of 
strategy, tactics, individual skills, and mindset operating in each case and its context. If arts 
entrepreneurship is a constant exercise in recombination, then the possibility of flexible recipes 
begins to reveal what might be regarded as the recombinant DNA of arts entrepreneurship. We 
are only beginning to understand the interactions between leadership and personal categories, 
between context and choice of tactics, between certain mindsets and the ability to use certain 
tactics effectively. There are many gaps in our understanding of each category as well as the 
interactions among categories, but enough literature has begun to accumulate on the subject of 
arts entrepreneurship to show that we are dealing with a complex and dynamic phenomenon. 
These categories begin to allow us to see “variables” rather than simply variety. Variables enable 
us to hypothesize relationships and to frame researchable questions. The resultant capacity for 
explanation, prediction, and choice will, in turn, help us to build models as well as discover how 
we can teach entrepreneurship. 
 

Next Steps: Exploring Other Types of Literature 
 While the literature in scholarly journals that we reviewed provided a sample adequate to 
begin developing a layered and flexible definition for the phenomenon of arts entrepreneurship, 
it does not tell the whole story of the how our thinking on this concept has evolved. Aside from 
Artivate, which was designed to focus on arts entrepreneurship, the scholarly literature displayed 
an initial spurt around 2003-2004 with only sporadic contributions appearing thereafter. A 
consistent stream of arts entrepreneurship literature only emerges with the establishment of the 
specialized journal Artivate. This is not the expected pattern for the growth of an idea and of 
interest in defining and operationalizing it, neither does this literature document or explain the 
intense interest in arts entrepreneurship pedagogy. We believe that other streams of literature and 
discourse have contributed to the emergence of the arts entrepreneurship concept. One additional 
stream lies in a number of scholarly books, most often edited collections, that produced literature 
that might otherwise have appeared in journals (e.g., Doig & Hargrove, 1990; Hagoort & 
Kooyman, 2009; Hagoort, Thomassen, & Kooyman, 2012; Henry, 2007; Scherdin & Zander, 
2011). Another stream can be traced through projects and studies that were stimulated by 
Foundation initiatives (e.g., Aageson, 2010; Beckman, 2007; Jackson, Kabwasa-Green, Herranz, 
Ferryman & Rosenstein, 2003; Markusen, 2013; Mirikitani, 2008). Yet another stream is evident 
in policy-directed research and program initiatives undertaken both in the US and abroad, 
especially in the Commonwealth nations (e.g., Higher Education Academy Art Design Media 
Subject Centre & National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, 2007; HKU, 
2010). And finally, we can also explore the literature published in arts disciplinary journals such 
as Theatre Topics and Arts Education Review for single field discussions. Only by tracing these 
additional streams of arts entrepreneurship literature can we piece together a more holistic 
understanding of the emergence of the concept of arts entrepreneurship as it currently exists. 



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These are avenues of further research that we are continuing to explore and hope to share with 
the field in the near future. 
 

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