Creative Infrastructures in the Spotlight: Shaping the Futures of Arts Entrepreneurship

2nd – 3rd June 2025,

Department of Digital Design and Information Studies

Aarhus University

How can we imagine, design, and create spaces for arts-based start-ups in a turbulent world?

Entrepreneurship from within artistic communities and directed at the creative industries is a poorly understand and routinely undervalued phenomenon. Spaces like ‘arts incubators’ uniquely bring together business incubation services with the world of artists and creative professionals – but they walk a difficult line. Such ‘creative infrastructure’ can often appear too capitalistic and profit-oriented for artists and art students. Equally, creative infrastructures can appear too artistically diffuse to those crafting entrepreneurship and investment policy, for whom high-growth and scalable tech enterprises are the ideal-type of entrepreneurship. To better understand how the entrepreneurial and artistic worlds could sustain each other through shared infrastructure, we need to first shed light upon the ‘ouroboros’ of value between economic, social and cultural capital, embodied in the figure of the artist-entrepreneur, as discussed in Linda Essig’s 2022 book, Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action (Intellect Books).

In this two-day colloquium, we invite scholars and practitioners from entrepreneurship studies, cultural policy, social sciences, and the arts, to explore the future of creative infrastructures (including arts incubators and other spaces of hybrid value creation) and their role in the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. As nations increasingly entangle their industrial policy with cultural branding, enterprises in the creative industries hold promise for creating more sustainable and diverse futures. To learn from the Anglo-American models of arts-incubators, the workshop features a keynote speech from Linda Essig, who pioneered arts incubator research and arts entrepreneurship education in US universities and launched Artivate: Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts. We invite you all to come and discuss the challenges and opportunities for creative infrastructures against the backdrop of socio-economic pressures.