
































Microsoft Word - Editors intro W16 _MF.docx


Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts    Volume 5, Issue 1 
http://artivate.org                      pp. 1-2 
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Copyright © 2016, the author   

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THE WINTER 2016 ISSUE 
Linda Essig, Arizona State University 
 
 This Winter 2016 issue of Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts focuses 
on curriculum and pedagogy. Two book reviews also contribute to this theme. Both feature 
articles, Marco Thom’s “Crucial Skills for the Entrepreneurial Success of Fine Artists” and 
Stephen Brandenburg, Tim Roosen, and Mettina Veenstra’s “Toward an Adapted Business 
Modeling Method to Improve Entrepreneurial Skills Among Art Students” delineate skills 
required for entrepreneurial success by artists and creative industries professionals as 
determined through qualitative or quantitative surveys of art and design instructors and 
students. Brandenburg and his collaborators evaluate the usefulness of several common 
business modeling tools for teaching toward these skillsets and finds that these tools are more 
effective for teaching entrepreneurial process than for building personal skills.  
 Two earlier articles in Artivate, Pollard and Wilson (2014) and Welsh, et al. (2014), 
also identify arts entrepreneurial skills through empirical inquiry. Thus, when taken together, 
an intersecting inventory of arts entrepreneurial skills begins to emerge from these four 
articles. Table 1 summarizes that inventory and attempts to create linkages across the skills 
articulated in each article. 
 
Pollard and 
Wilson 

Welsh et al. Thom Brandenburg et al. 

Collaboration1 Networking Networking Exchanging 
experiences 

 Business 
Management 

Finance  

 Technology   
Strategic/analytical 
thinking 

 Strategic thinking Diverging and 
converging 

Creative thinking  Idea generation Validating ideas 
Confidence  Leadership Developing 

personal identity 
Communication Marketing Sales/Marketing Communicating 

visually 
Understanding 
context 

 Opportunity 
recognition 

Determining 
professional value 

Table 1. Arts Entrepreneurship Skills Articulate in Recent Artivate Articles.  
 
 Interestingly, only two families of skillsets are delineated in all four articles. While 
there are some variations in how the various authors define the skillsets they describe, it 
seems as though families of skills related to networking and collaboration and marketing 
communication appear across all four. These align with preliminary findings from a national 
(US) survey of professional artists in which respondents indicate that marketing and 
networking are among their most pressing professional development needs (Flanagan and 
Essig, 2016). 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1 Krebs and Holley suggest that networks are built or “woven” to bring people together “to learn to collaborate” 
(2006, p. 10). 



Essig    Editor’s Introduction 
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Artivate 5 (1)   

 

2 

 The ongoing maturation of arts entrepreneurship as an academic field of inquiry and 
practice is further evidenced by the recent or imminent publication of several books on the 
topic, two of which are reviewed in this issue. Global perspectives are both represented in 
Creating Cultural Capital: Cultural Entrepreneurship in Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy, a 
volume of essays that grew out of a 2015 conference on the topic at University of Minnesota 
– Duluth. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, author of Performing Policy, writes in his review that the 
volume is both ambitious and rigorous as well as “a handy teaching tool for arts, 
entrepreneurship, and public policy educators and practitioners working at all levels and 
locations.” Sally Packard reviews Bonita Kolb’s teaching text, Entrepreneurship for the 
Creative and Cultural Industries: Mastering Management in the Creative and Cultural 
Industries, that offers an Australian perspective on arts entrepreneurship, a perspective that 
appears to speak more to managers than to the individual student artists/entrepreneur who is 
the unit of analysis in the feature articles.  
 

References 
 
Flanagan M. and Essig, L. (2016). Summary of findings and recommendations: Organization 

and artist survey. Unpublished whitepaper for the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.  
Krebs, V., & Holley, J. (2006). Building smart communities through network 

weaving. Appalachian Center for Economic Networks. Retrieved from www. 
acenetworks.org. 

Pollard, V. & Wilson, E. (2014). The “Entrepreneurial Mindset” in creative and performing 
arts higher education in Australia. Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, 3 
(1), 3-22.  

Welsh, D.H.B., Onishi, T., DeHoog, R.H., Syed. S. (2014). Responding to the needs and 
challenges of arts entrepreneurs: An exploratory study of arts entrepreneurship in North 
Carolina higher education. Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, 3 (2), 
21-37.  

 
 


