More than 30 authors in 17 countries are the “pioneering minds”, who lead readers to the exploration of the “Entrepreneurial Principles of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs)”. Even if CCIs play a key role in the European and global economy, cultural entrepreneurship is still a new knowledge domain and the added value of this book is not only to deepen the academic debate in this field but also to let people know how CCIs work.
Key Elements, Concepts & Perspectives, Urban Area Development, Innovation and Education are the five central topics, which outline the structure of the book, holding contributions from a variety of subjects coming not only from the academic world, but also from the private one in order to highlight the different perspectives and the complexity deriving from the hybrid character of CCIs.
The articles collected in Key Elements section – the first topic debated – analyse the components of cultural and creative industries, trying to understand the specific phases of their existence and the influence that technological, managerial and financial aspects have on the CCIs development.
Starting from an overview of the existing Creative Life Cycle Modeling, Giep Hagoort – cultural entrepreneur, art and economy professor at the Utrecht University – proposes an interesting Life Cycle framework for supporting the CCIs. Structured into five phases, the model starts with “the so called pre-positioning phase”, during which “creative people prepare to start their own creative firm”. The following three steps, derived from the “Utrecht Model”, are the Start-up, Build-up and Build-out phases, which are respectively the birth, the structuring of the organization and the “production of a variety of products and services within several departments”. The “connecting phase” is the last one.
In the section Concept & Perspectives, the articles focus on the environment of the creative industries both from an internal and external perspective. If creativity as seen by Wijdenes as a powerful instrument to the mutual enrichment of artists and entrepreneurs, the Symbolic Value of the Creative Industries is the subject of the study conducted by Guiette, Jacobs, Loots, Schramme and Vandenbempt. From an external perspective, Roberta Comunian points out the role of cluster as a learning infrastructure and support for CCIs, while the article written by Bille and De Paoli focuses on the issues of public policies in supporting this specific sector.
As stressed by the title – Urban Area Development -, this section analyses the connection between “the entrepreneurial dimension of the culture and creative industries and urban development”. Culture and creative sector has a key role in designing or redesigning new routes of economic growth for cities and meanwhile increasing their attractiveness, as turned out by the example of Berlin and Istanbul.
Culture and creativity, and their innovative potential, have also an important impact on society issues, because of their attitude in improving the quality of individual and collective life toward a more inclusive society. In particular, as pointed out in the Preface, the “creative and cultural entrepreneurial skills such as problem-solving, creativity and design thinking” outline the CCIs attitude in “leading change as an agent for social transformations through design”.
Education is the last topic analised by the authors, who underline the need of improving the research activities in education and training in the perspective of reinforcing the entrepreneurial dimension of cultural and creative industries.
Pioneering Minds Worldwide
On the Entrepreneurial Principles of the Cultural and Creative Industries
Giep Hagoort, Aukje Thomassen, Rene Kooyman (Ed)
Eburon Accademic Press, 2012
$ 28.00
