We’ve already noted how better understanding the consumer is critical to the success of cultural entrepreneurship. Market research can be used to identify the needs of consumers, as well as predicting how the market may receive a new product or service. However, many cultural entrepreneurs view formal market research with suspicion. Perhaps rightly so.

For the cultural entrepreneur, consumer empowerment places a premium on cultural literacy, creativity and symbolic knowledge as sources of power. Socio-cultural factors outweigh traditional production factors in determining the viability of a cultural product. Whereas in other industries, the ‘quality of the idea’ may be sufficient to predict success against, the cultural entrepreneur must contemplate and balance a much wider range of factors.

Self-belief is a basis for legitimacy available to the cultural entrepreneur at any time. This is especially useful in the early stages, before support networks begin to provide such a function. Despite this, self-belief can be difficult to maintain within the project culture of the cultural and creative industries. The constant cycles of self-belief result from there not being the safety net that comes from being something more conventional.

Interactions with others within and outside an organisation benefit an entrepreneur both politically and creatively. A coalition of supporters can exert enough power and resources to make it possible to implement an idea, whilst at the same time providing critical feedback from people who see the world differently.

Space and time are essential ingredients for successfully developing an idea through to implementation. For many entrepreneurs, a period of self-reflection is a significant resource, useful for developing the idea in their own minds.

Lessen the power that money has over your plans and suddenly opportunities seem much more attractive, and the implementation of great ideas becomes more achievable. How can this be done? The best cultural entrepreneurs do it on a daily basis…

In short, how can aspiring cultural entrepreneurs navigate and exploit the opportunities created by future trends? Do we catch and exploit trends – and if so, how? – or, as the creative powerhouse of society, should culture institutions be creating them?

Let’s take the analogy of ideas being currency. Like the 20p piece in your pocket, they represent value but it’s a value that is only realised when you actually spend it. Why does this matter? Because we’re losing or throwing away scores of ideas on a daily basis.

Is experience more important for an entrepreneur than classic expertise? Experience often teaches the entrepreneur basic lessons about the sector and how to meet the various critical success factors.

Experience teaches, for example, the importance of allowing an idea to have ‘bedding down’ time before implementing the next idea.

Access to and application of information is critical to the success of a cultural entrepreneur. In Rifkin’s ‘weightless economy’, the creative industries prize “intangible forms of power bound up in bundles of information and intellectual assets.” ‘Intellectual capital’ enhances competitiveness and strategic success.

Before an arts or culture institution can begin to fully realise its potential, we need to be clear what assets it has to work with. Many organisations I speak to have a lot of trouble articulating exactly where their sources of value and differentiation rest.

I am therefore proposing six categories of culture assets as a starting point for discussion: product, process, form, values, physical and relationships.

Everyone seems to have their own meaning for the word ‘entrepreneurship’, so what do we mean by it?

“In the public sector,” one of our contacts observed, “the title ‘entrepreneur’ seems to refer to anyone who takes any initiative.”

They are not alone in this view. Emerging from our initial interviews for the MLA West Midland’s Entrepreneurial Museum research is a consensus that entrepreneurship relates to “better ways of working”, being “more resourceful” in using existing finance and sourcing new finance, and generally developing a plurality of income streams.