Cultural Entrepreneurship
The CultureLabel lifestyle of choice.
Culture meets consumer culture
Where better to get on and do great ideas than the space where culture and consumers meet? A space ripe for new, original thinking as mainstream consumers demand more and better interactions with artistic content, experiences and brands.
CultureLabel is living, breathing cultural entrepreneurship. We're built on the belief that devising a healthy strategy to balance the cultural and the commercial makes the difference between a strained marriage of convenience and a mutual love-in with remarkable babies.
Proof's in the pudding
Talking about cultural entrepreneurship is one thing. Living by it is another story altogether.
Based on our hands-on experiences, we were asked to manage a project called the 'Entrepreneurial Museum' for the UK museums agencies MLA and Renaissance - looking at what exactly cultural entrepreneurship and income generation means for museums and cultural organisations.
The resulting book formed a broad overview of our thinking. The snippets are intended to be used as diving boards rather than fully-formed answers, but are woven around 7 areas that we believe are critical to get right in order for entrepreneurship to flourish within a museum or culture institution.
We're passionate about cultural entrepreneurship, and hope that this book stimulates debate and argument, encouraging reviews of some established norms and the exploration of new perspectives.
Click to download the pdf (4.07mb) »
Extra case study #1: Small museums
Respect, Protect, Enhance
Art challenges the status quo, the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary. It elevates people to a higher ideal, a commonality of history or social bonds, or it dares to question the accepted norms of today. It means something.
If handled well, the brands of culture institutions – the guardians of this valuable resource – make powerful antidotes to the often hollow brands of commerce.The difficulty comes in leveraging this value without damaging the very integrity that makes it special.
It’s demanding; it provides ample opportunity; it’s frightening; it’s the art of the possible.
The CultureLabel team is passionate about respecting, protecting and enhancing the cultural core of our network of museums and arts partners. We've built our business to prove that, through cultural entrepreneurship, good business and great art can be mutually reinforcing.
In turn, by promoting cultural shopping we aim to encourage a new form of patronage and support for arts organisations. It's a smarter way to shop, and provides a new stream of income to invest in delivering exceptional cultural content.
Demolish those walls!
Galleries, museums, demolish those walls! CultureLabel is working with a select group of culture organisations to reimagine and create a full-on Digital Museum experience.
The ever-spiralling ability of technology to transform distribution channels provides great opportunities for entrepreneurial uses of digitised cultural content.
It’s all about getting content out to where it is demanded, as the business model for culture institutions is evolving to that of distributor as well as creator.