This article explores the lived experience of being an entrepreneur in the creative industries.Entrepreneurial and creative organizations are frequently cited as necessary ingredients for thriving economies.While the individual/society nexus has been well documented by entrepreneurship scholars, the experiences of individuals within the creative industries remains under-theorized.This study seeks to contribute to an understanding of the life of the creative industries entrepreneur and is underpinned by a social constructionist philosophy.Three creative industry entrepreneurs were interviewed twice, and the data were analyzed using the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.Detailed idiographic accounts were created of each entrepreneur before cross-case analysis occurred.While the sample size for the study is small, the results indicate that creative industry entrepreneurs do not align themselves with traditional entrepreneurship discourses.The need to express their creativity through products, experiences, and services is balanced against the need to generate income and varying strategies are employed to do so.Research findings have implications for the education and support of creative industry entrepreneurs, and for policymakers.Patten "Creative?"…"Entrepreneur?" _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Artivate 5 (2) 24Patten "Creative?"…"Entrepreneur?" _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Artivate 5 (2) 25 able to produce output that can fulfil these criteria.The creative act whereby "that which is unknown, or known in another way, becomes translated into an image to be re-presented to itself" (Townley and Beech, 2010, p. 12) must be stripped of its mystery if it is to become operationalized within organizational settings.Within creative studies, it is accepted that "innovation", that is, creativity which can change a domain, can only happen after years of technical knowledge and immersion in a field.Organizations serious about creativity must invest significantly and absorb the risk that such investment may not yield hoped for, but still expected, results.Creative work encompasses the ethereal and the mundane, the autotelic, suspended state of the creative act (Csikzentmihalyi, 1996) and the prosaic view of creative work in which "works of art can be made in an orderly, rational and manageable manner" (Dixon, 2010, p. 48). Process models of creativityProcess models of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997;Amabile, 2012) offer frameworks for considering how creativity functions within social systems.Creativity occurs at the intersection of the domain, the field, and the person.Domains (such as poetry, branches of science, architecture) are knowledge bases based around symbols, rules, and notation systems which allow things to be understood, "…an isolated little world in which a person can think and act with clarity and concentration" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 37).Fields, made up of experts in a given domain whose job involves passing judgment on performance in that domain, allowing it to be accepted or not, and including teachers, critics, gate-keepers, and other domain experts, represent the "gate" (Cooper, 2002) through which the creative work passes.The person, as the third element in the model, displays intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (Amabile, 1996).The extent to which creative individuals respond to intrinsic motivators (satisfaction, fulfilment) doing things for which they expect "neither fame nor fortune" (Csikszentmihalyi, 2004) as opposed to extrinsic motivations such as market demands, financial reward and domain recognition (Fletcher, 2006) is a matter of choice and personal agency.Positioning themselves along the continuum of behaviors from "a total focus on creative output to a complete commitment to economic performance" (Tjemkes, 2013, p. 122) can result in liberation or oppression from the status quo.Different levels of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be traced to different sectors within the creative industries (Penaluna and Penaluna, 2011, p. 65): fine artists have "primarily intrinsic desires to feed their creativity" while designers have to respond to problems identified by clients, and are less "what I want" and more "what they want".Research conducted by Gluck (2002) indicates that "free" creative industries professional (those not restricted by external constraints) hold different conceptions of creativity to their fellow "constrained" counterparts.Within the creative industries (DCMS, 1998), tacit knowledge, gained through practice and reflection, operates to challenge individuals to "…develop their own creative repertoires."(Taylor, 2011, p42).Constraints presented by industry structure, funding, level of porosity, or development of the field provide opportunities for creative individuals, as would-be entrepreneurs, to identify or make opportunities.The need for autonomy (Penaluna and Penaluna, 2011), the attitude to risk (Taylor, 2011) and traits of curiosity, tenacity, and collaboration of creative people (Rabideau, 2015), also commonly cited as entrepreneurial characteristics (Ko and Butler, 2007), provide a useful bridge to consider current debates in entrepreneurship.Creative ideas must be tradable, either Patten "Creative?"…"Entrepreneur?" _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Artivate 5 (2) 26
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