Idea Generation Through Main Clusters

Entrepreneurship in the creative industry sector has been recognized as a distinctive and increasingly important area of the national economy. Therefore, some clusters are basically focused on cultural entrepreneurship and it would be: the process of getting a cultural ‘product’ (such as a live performance or a recorded track) from the artist/composer to the ‘consumer’. This involves the ‘value-adding’ (entrepreneurial) activities of, using a music industry example, record production, music publishing, artist management, audience development, promotion and distribution (retail and online) The rapid growth of the Internet and the digital distribution of music, the emergence of on-line music businesses using the latest technology, have more recently led to an increasingly significant entrepreneurial role in the main growth areas of the music industry . Further, there is currently a substantial and growing interest among the performing arts sector in developing entrepreneurship and the related area of equipping students for self-employment or ‘portfolio careers’ in the arts and entertainment sector.

However,‘Artist-entrepreneurs’ may not necessarily even have set out to start a business. Their main focus may be on
developing their own practice, but they face a need to come to terms with a commercial environment in order to be able to make enough money to continue their artistic work, or see the commercial market as a means of communicating with a larger audience – which then involves developing the necessary management and organizational skills to facilitate the performance and promotion of their work (e.g. organizing touring productions/ companies, writing business plans and understanding of copyright and contractual issues).

Freelancing and self-employment are the most frequent types of employment in the creative sector and there are particularly large concentrations of small enterprises and sole traders in music and the performing arts, film, TV and radio.