Over the 2000s, Toronto initiated and instituted a process of cultivating itself as a creative city. Entrepreneurial city visionaries found that in order to enter the global market, their planning had to be strategic. This paper explores how Toronto’s policy entrepreneurs used planning, partnerships, and an expanded definition of economic development to create a “Cultural Camelot.” In addition to competing on the financial and revenue-generating fronts, a coalition of cross-sector leaders took on the challenge of fostering a livable city with a deep social ethos imbued within a variety of dimensions of urban life. This new focus gave Toronto the chance establish itself as a center for innovation, which strengthened urban cultural capital and helped promote the strategic agenda of becoming a competitor in the creative economy sector. Investment in research and creative city strategic planning, coupled with the allocation of financial and human capital resources across a variety of industries, served to encourage creativity, promote culture and competitiveness, and drive economic development.

The two authors are members of punk rock trio the Eruptörs. Both also teach in higher education – one in popular music, and the other in management and marketing. Writing from experience in the Eruptörs, we present a case study of the band, and draw on theoretical perspectives from our respective, intersecting fields to explore the Eruptörs’ entrepreneurship, collaborations, networks, and creativities in the “DIY” underground punk rock scene. The paper provides cross-disciplinary insights into internal and external cultures of the Eruptörs. Proposing this as a teaching case, the authors conclude that students, scholars, and practitioners in music education, popular music studies, and related disciplines and fields involving entrepreneurship could benefit from engaging in reflexive and entrepreneurial practice which explores and incorporates ideas, models, and syntheses discussed in this paper.

As the first peer reviewed research journal in the field of arts entrepreneurship, Artivate: A Journal of Arts Entrepreneurship takes its role as a framer of the discourse in and around arts entrepreneurship seriously. To advance that discourse, in addition to the articles and book reviews that have been regular features of Artivate, we have invited members of our editorial board and staff to contribute short think pieces. For these pieces we asked contributors to consider open-ended questions to which they could respond in whole or in part: what is their position in relation to arts entrepreneurship; how is arts entrepreneurship situated in relation to other disciplines or fields; what are the problems we are grappling with as scholars, practitioners, teachers, and artists; and what are the research questions we are attempting to answer individually or as a field? Following, you will find responses from: Andrew Taylor, Associate Professor of arts management at American University; Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of performance as public practice at UT-Austin and author of Performing Policy (reviewed in this issue); and Artivate’s publisher and co-editor, Linda Essig, Evelyn Smith Professor and director of the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State.