Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 10

Three Angular Journeys of Entrepreneurship

In the previous chapter we considered how alternating phases of dilettante and diligent behaviours occur in strategic entrepreneurship. Now we consider how these phases, and the ensuing entrepreneurial angles of recognition, development, evaluation, elaboration and launch may be enacted: by presenting three journeys of strategic entrepreneurship. Each comes from what are generally called the creative or cultural industries – from publishing, fashion and video games. While these three journeys are reasonably typical, in our experience, of how strategic entrepreneurship tends to work in almost any industry, their cultural context makes it easy to relate to the type of products they speak of and heightens the drama of strategic entrepreneurship – thus making the journeys memorable.

At one end of the entrepreneurial leap, the cultural industries are characterized by an oversupply of potential products for development and a risky and expensive process of prototype production. The combination of developing, marketing and launching a new video game or a book, for example, requires a major investment in sunk costs, with no guaranteed return. Typically, only around one in ten products pays for itself, and the few successes must bankroll a catalogue of failures. In the era of free online content, that 10% success rate is likely to diminish. In the music industry a 2008 industry survey found that of 13 million tracks available online, ...