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.