Kristiina Urb leads the Creative Industries and Smart Cities research group in an Estonian Business School. She has a years-long deep interest in cultural and creative industries (CCI). Her journey has taken her from art college to becoming a creative entrepreneur, to researching creative and cultural industries as a Ph.D. student and consulting cultural and creative organizations in Estonia and Europe as an expert.
CCI is a dynamic and influential field that has a substantial impact beyond its own sector, for example, activities in the CCI have a subsequent broader impact on places, society, or the economy through the overflow of concepts, ideas, skills, knowledge, and different types of capital (“Cultural and creative spillovers in Europe” report, 2015). In Urb’s research, the CCI entrepreneur is considered one who uses the scarce resources of individual creativity, skills, and talent to develop and produce goods and services. However, according to the UNCTAD Creative Economy Report (2010), the creative economy is not precisely the same as the rest of the economy, and according to the Mapping of Nordic Creative and Cultural Industries: Financial Environment report (2015), creative industries are not as monolithic as capacity oriented industries, but have a multitude of dimensions because they also create social, cultural and sustainable development value in addition to economic value.
Therefore, understanding the CCI entrepreneurs’ motivation better and how this may differ from what motivates other entrepreneurs to execute entrepreneurial opportunities is also crucial for creative business incubators. This knowledge helps incubators to support CCI entrepreneurs when it comes to cooperation with other industries. Partnerships like these are essential because CCI stimulates combining different resources of technology, arts, business, and culture.
For example, when it comes to CCI entrepreneurs, the question of what motivates a person to engage in entrepreneurial activity and exploit the entrepreneurial opportunities is intrinsically related to the question of what encourages a person’s creativity because without the second one the first one cannot exist. Therefore, CCI entrepreneurs may be more motivated by intrinsic motivation. While others by extrinsic motivation, or at least, CCI entrepreneurs may perceive it to be like this. This may lead to a communication gap between CCI entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs, which affects their cooperation.
Source: https://www.encatc.org/media/5142-creativ-entrepreneurs-perception-of-e…
Therefore, the first step for creative business incubators – when it comes to bridging the communication gap between CCI and other entrepreneurs and enhancing their cooperation – Urb encourages to start with the concept of “value creation” since this concept is intrinsic for both. It’s being used and understood, though with some alterations in everyday use, by CCI as well as other entrepreneurs.
When entrepreneurs identify new business opportunities, they need to persuade others that the opportunity they have discovered is, in fact, valuable, e.g. when pitching for investors. Therefore they need to explain the value they are creating clearly. Also, value creation is used for measuring financial performance in addition to using data offered by accounting (Trifan and Suciu, 2015). Therefore, the concepts of “value” and “value creation” are substantial parts of the entrepreneurial language.
On the other hand, providing some new value through their work, i.e. “value creation”, is also essential for creative individuals. For example, if their creation is critical about society or some processes and helps to share light on issues. A necessary condition for any artwork’s existence is the artistic expression because it contributes to the setting of the value share of an artwork (Florian, 2015). Hence, the concept of value creation is also known to CCI entrepreneurs and other creative individuals who decide to start their own business.
Therefore, Urb recommends creative business incubators to help CCI and other entrepreneurs to understand that they are both creating value and use this common ground as something to bring them more together and ease the potential cooperation between them.
At the moment Urb is researching how to bridge creatives and tech using co-creation enablers in dyadic problem-solving processes during software development projects and about the dynamics between the enablers for more effective cooperation, co-creation, and collaboration processes between CCI and non-CCI.
To read Kristiina Urb’s full paper in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy journal, please visit:
https://www.encatc.org/media/5142-creativ-entrepreneurs-perception-of-entrepreneurial-motivation.pdf
URB, K.. (2019). Creative entrepreneurs’ perception of entrepreneurial motivation: a valuable insight for creative business incubators when supporting creative entrepreneurs’ cooperation with other industries. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 9 (2), pp. 17-30.
