This paper applies the social bricolage construct to arts entrepreneurship, utilizing an indepth case study for illustration. The importance of six key elements including: making do, a refusal to be constrained by limitations, improvisation, social value creation, stakeholder participation, and persuasion, are identified and discussed in light of the recent formation of the Grand River Jazz Society. Bricolage is shown to be a process whereby entrepreneurs with local knowledge and access to local resources are best able to create enterprises using the materials at hand, rather than overextending their efforts with externally directed attributes requiring unattainable resources. As such, entrepreneurial process elements may be emulated from successful social bricolage examples, recognizing that each context, community, and circumstances will require their own unique solutions.

Creative and performing arts schools are increasingly facing the challenge of developing curricula to address an employability agenda in higher education. Arts entrepreneurship education is thought to address this need because it supports the unique nature of the work circumstances of creative and performing arts graduates. As an emerging area of research, arts entrepreneurship education faces the challenge of not only being relevant and important to creative and performing arts education but of being robust enough to contribute to a “paradigm shift” (Beckman, 2011, p. 29). With this in mind, this article attempts to clarify a recurring theme of arts entrepreneurship education, this being the development of an “entrepreneurial mindset.”

We argue that if an entrepreneurial mindset is to be considered an essential aspect of arts entrepreneurship education, educators need to have a good understanding of what it means and how it might be taught. We examine data from four interviews with arts educators who have responsibility for teaching arts entrepreneurship in creative and performing arts schools. Their experiences enable us to clarify the meaning of an “entrepreneurial mindset” in a creative and performing arts context in higher education and to make suggestions about teaching and learning.

While many professional arts training programs prepare students to excel at the practice and performance of the arts, evidence suggests that many professional arts training programs may be failing to prepare students to be professional artists. A total of 11.1% of all recent college graduates with undergraduate arts degrees are unemployed (Carnevale, Cheah, & Strohl, 2012, p. 7).

Fifty-two percent of arts undergraduate alumni reported being dissatisfied with their institution’s ability to advise them about further career or education opportunities (SNAAP, 2012, p. 14). Eighty-one percent of all arts undergraduate alumni reported having a primary job outside of the arts for reasons of job security (SNAAP, 2012, p. 19). Many arts higher education administrators address the situation by advising arts students to attend business and entrepreneurship courses. However, these courses are often taught or presented outside of an arts training context. Arts entrepreneurship education can serve as contextual business/career/technology education for arts students; however, barriers make it difficult for administrators to create adequate curricular room for arts entrepreneurship education.

Furthermore, the teaching and learning of contextual business/career/technology education in professional arts training programs may often be thought of as helpful but not essential, as evidenced by the National Office of Arts Accreditation (NOAA) classification of these types of courses as general education units. This essay supports the need for arts entrepreneurship education, and discusses key barriers to recognizing arts entrepreneurship education as essential to professional arts training.

This article argues that the current economic design of the US not-for-profit arts sector, specifically theatre, fails to support the long-term wellness of the cultural worker and the cultural commons. As a solution, we propose a global, commons-based alternative economy and complementary currency called Culture Coin that creates new wealth, abundance, and virtuous social behaviors by matching unmet needs with underutilized resources that our current economy fails to circulate. The current design of our arts economy results in generative artists being disproportionately poorer, unjust disparities in how resources are distributed, and social behaviors in the nonprofit sector that mimic for profit, commercial enterprises. The arts sector has an over-dependence on uncompensated or undercompensated “sweat equity” and volatile philanthropic funding. We detail the value and characteristics of a commons framework for entrepreneurial activity and describe internet-enabled peer production as a way to build cultural commons as well as the most effective way to collectively co-create and deploy the Culture Coin project.

In this essay, I investigate the relationship between local political context and entrepreneurship in the arts, specifically entrepreneurship by cultural institutions, which I refer to as “cultural entrepreneurship.” I look at cultural entrepreneurship as a discourse and discuss one locus in particular, the city of Utrecht in The Netherlands. The discourse on cultural entrepreneurship in the Dutch context is influenced by diminishing government responsibility for financial support of the arts. Entrepreneurship is seen in that context as finding new sources of income. Entrepreneurial values such as curiosity and experimentation are dominant in the routine relationship between cultural organizations and their subsidizing administrations but are not incorporated in the understanding of cultural entrepreneurship. After applying these considerations to the observation of the culture-political practice in the city of Utrecht, I suggest a framework that allows us to understand the discourse on the relationship between cultural entrepreneurship and political context along two axes. One axis moves between risk acceptance and aversion, and the other between the private and public interests.