Creative Practices and Entrepreneurship

What we do:

Society is confronted with many complex and interrelated challenges. From large-scale issues such as climate change, migration and digitalisation to challenges in lifestyle areas such as healthcare, work, and living together. Problems of such complexity demand new ways of thinking and acting, based on creativity, entrepreneurship and collaboration.

Sustainable forms of value

In this regard, entrepreneurship means more than running a business. It is about the capacity of using your creative practice to start initiatives, forge new connections and create sustainable forms of value.
That’s no easy task, because the creative and cultural sectors are under pressure themselves as well. Many artists, designers and cultural organisations are facing insecure living conditions, rising work pressure and the constant challenge to organise their practice sustainably in the long term. Meanwhile, there’s the ever-louder political question of what the value – and thus the right of existence – of art and culture actually is.

Answers to society’s challenges

The new professorship will study the ways in which artists, designers, and other creative makers can contribute to the search for solutions on society’s challenges. And how, in doing so, they can get to new forms of organising their creative practices to ensure they are healthy and sustainable. For this purpose, we look at innovative working methods in the arts itself, and at the power of artistic practices for society and organisations, as tools for imagination, questioning and (co-)designing. Think, for example, of performances that can make healthcare relations more tangible, or design processes in which policy makers and citizens together outline new future scenarios.

New ways of creating value

We investigate how entrepreneurship in the creative processes can lead to new ways of creating value – in terms of artistic, social, ecological and economic value. Not by determining in advance what is ‘valuable’, but by studying actual practices to see how value is brought about, shared, and organised sustainably.

To achieve this, we focus on questions such as:

• How can makers act in an entrepreneurial way that matches their ethics and practices?
• Which competencies and collaborative forms are required to contribute towards social innovation?
• How can new business models or forms of organising do justice to both artistic integrity and social relevance?

By means of practice-based research, in close collaboration with students, lecturers and external partners, we develop insights that contribute to a more sustainable and healthy arts sector, and to the broader transitions of society.

How we do this:

Our research always starts from the creative practices of makers. From situations in which artists, designers and creative professionals cooperate with others on social issues. Such practices are not just cases to study as outsiders, but living laboratories in which we collectively investigate how valuable and ethical forms of entrepreneurship are shaped.

We engage in long-term partnerships with artists, cultural institutions and social organisations. Within these collaborations, we combine artistic and social-scientific research methods, ranging from artistic experimentation and fieldwork to co-creation, interviews, and visual or material forms of documentation. In this way, research emerges that not only describes, but also contributes to new ways of working and organising within and beyond the creative and cultural sector.

The professorship is organised into three mutually related lines of research:

1. Innovated business models for the creative practice

In this line, we explore how artists and creative professionals can organise their work sustainably, in economic, social and ecological terms. We examine alternative organisational models, shared infrastructures, and entrepreneurial skills that are suited to the arts.

One example is the doctoral research, Laat creatieve broedplaatsen werken (Making Creative Breeding Grounds Work), by Ruben de Boer, where he investigates how artistic breeding grounds can develop new forms of value creation and resilience within a changing cultural ecosystem.

2. Nieuwe vormen van transdisciplinaire samenwerking

How can artists collaborate with partners from other sectors such as healthcare, technology or science, without losing touch with their own personal ways of working? In this research line, we develop and test new forms of collaboration, that merge knowledge development, imagination and reflection.

An example is the project Teach Us How to Feel (together with MU Hybrid Art House en Innovation:Lab), investigating how embodied knowledge and artificial intelligence can mutually reinforce each other in a collective artistic process.

3. Impact and value of the arts

What does it mean to make the value of art visible without reducing it to measurable output? This strand focuses on developing concepts, language, and methods to understand the social significance and impact of artistic practices through relationships of care, attention, and reciprocity.

Example: doctoral researcher Esther Willemse examines in her project From Economic Value to Existential Meaning: ArtInfused Cultural Management Education how artistic experiences can take a more central place in cultural management education and policy by taking existential rather than purely economic values as the point of departure.

Public Lecture and Installation - May 2022