The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation

This paper situates the context for entrepreneurship in the creative industries sector in New Zealand. Setting promotion of the creative industries against an overarching national context of the government's Growth and Innovation Framework, the focus of the paper is the screen production industry, mainly the film industry. Buoyed by The Lord of the Rings –The Return of the King's Oscar success and other acclaim, the industry appears to be surfing high waves, making it an interesting case to examine. Commencing with delineation of the nature of entrepreneurship in the creative sector, the discussion continues within an integrative multi-level entrepreneurship framework.

The emergence of an unparalleled national economic performance, labelled the Celtic Tiger, has given Irish business educators the challenging task of analysing and recording their country's burgeoning growth over the past decade. As part of this development, Riverdance –an upbeat combination of Irish music and dance – hit the world stage, demonstrating that entrepreneurship and innovation are as much part of the success process within the creative industries as is the case in any other sector of the economy. By researching the advent and ongoing development of Riverdance and the follow-on show, Lord of the Dance, it is believed that invaluable insights can be gained into the creative entrepreneurial process, including the shows' particular characteristics, their development needs, how innovative entrepreneurs work, and the particular barriers they face. This paper shows how, through publishing a series of studies on Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, it has been possible to demonstrate that the evolution of ‘New Age’ Irish dance, with its unprecedented success abroad, can provide an important role model for both the arts/culture sector and the Irish business community in general. Additionally, these entertainment industry cases, among others, provide an opportunity for considering the confluence within Irish music in terms of its traditional, classical and contemporary forms, within the rapidly changing educational, social and cultural landscape of a burgeoning economy that has earned the title, the Celtic Tiger.

The UK government has recently established the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) to promote entrepreneurship in higher education, across all subject disciplines. This article considers the UK government's policy initiative from the perspective of a new project supporting tutors in the performing arts sector, who are working to ‘bridge the gap’ between arts education and professional artistic practice. The article explores, in particular, fundamental issues such as: what is distinctive about cultural entrepreneurship and how can it be taught? It also discusses the role of higher education institutions in developing relationships with the creative industries sector and in developing training and support systems for aspiring professional artists.

There is a substantial amount of work published on networking; however, analysis of network typology is rare and even rarer in the context of the performing arts. This paper proposes a typology, the ‘embedded-project’, and the study suggests that, although network members' skills and tasks are subject to change within a short timescale, they exist within a stable, permanent network. The paper describes the key dimensions of the typology, such as: objectives, flow of resources, specialization, redundancy, flexibility, access to network, distribution of power, governance mechanisms, interdependencies, durability and legitimacy.

Microbusinesses in the creative industries manage the tension between creativity and organization, money and meaning in many different ways. How this balancing act is accomplished depends on skills and competencies. But even more than that, it is a question of the personal values of the people who founded the organization. Instinct Domain, a private firm located in Vienna, conducted a series of in-depth interviews with business founders in the creative industries in order to explore the attitudes, values and beliefs that impact on the strategy, structure and culture of their organization at the deepest level. This article describes some of the outcomes from this project.

Cultural diffusion is a distinctive approach to running a creative enterprise through applied creativity, shared discourse and social construction, going beyond the conventional understanding of ‘cultural production and consumption’. The concept is used to explore the social and creative processes of interaction between the creative enterprise and the audience. A framework for the analysis of creative enterprises and a set of questions based on the five processes of cultural diffusion are proposed for use by practitioners.

As Russia moves from a demand-led to a market economy, small cultural enterprises are emerging in a sporadic and fragmented way, often encouraged by teams of Western experts. This article argues that Western models of cultural growth are not always appropriate models for Russia, because the history of cultural development and consumption has followed entirely different patterns; concepts of the fundamental roles of culture are different; and culture-led regeneration has to tackle different problems from those of the West. It is also suggested that Russia may have advantages not typical of Western economies that can be exploited in cultural enterprise growth. The article concludes with three examples of emerging cultural enterprise in Moscow and St Petersburg.

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