Craft Entrepreneurship

Building commercial potential for craft businesses

'Making it to Market: Developing the market for contemporary crafts (ACE, 2006) identifies the crafts as a significant component of the creative industries, estimated to be worth around £883 million with a potential to increase its market by 63%. However, craft practitioners experience significant barriers in developing craft enterprises: the struggle to find a large enough market to support their work, poor brand image, lack of business and commercialisation skill and weak distribution networks. As a leading provider of craft education in the region, the University for the Creative Arts designed the 'Craft Entrepreneurship' Workshop to begin to address the challenges faced by the sector.

'Craft Entrepreneurship' was designed as a one day learning workshop bringing together postgraduate students in craft, entrepreneurship and branding with industry experts to develop innovative branding and marketing proposals for the region's next generation of craft entrepreneurs. It explored how combining different types of creativity (craft and branding) with specialist business skills (marketing and entrepreneurship) could build the commercial potential for craft businesses resulting in a new vision for craft enterprises and new approaches to curriculum design.

The Workshop

The Workshop took place in February 2008 and involved 32 students from 10 Universities across the South East. Students were placed in teams comprising a craft, entrepreneurship and branding student with the aim of devising a business strategy for the craft students' products. The Workshop was structured around key presentations from Mark Bickers, award winning glass designer, Lynne Franks, PR expert and Ray Wright, financial consultant. The day culminated in each team giving a 20 minute presentation to an expert panel addressing the themes of concept, market and PR, retail, distribution and finance.

The Symposium

In June 2008 a Dissemination & Networking Symposium was held to share best practice and disseminate the findings from the Workshop and look at ways to sustain the impetus created. The Symposium allowed staff from different HE disciplines in the south east together with enterprise professionals and representatives from regional and national arts agencies the opportunity to: network, gain new insights into entrepreneurship education, discuss ideas for curriculum development/design and consider future models for creative entrepreneurship. In addition it contributed to the development of an HE network for craft entrepreneurship.

The Way Forward

The Workshop and subsequent Symposium in June 2008 highlighted a number of issues which Higher Education should continue to debate, including the development of sustainable curriculum models, the power of multi-disciplinary learning and the need for collaboration between HEIs, public sector organisations and employers to create vital and responsive forms of entrepreneurship education.

More Information

A booklet (Craft Entrepreneurship: meeting the challenge) featuring case studies for each team involved in Craft Entrepreneurship together with a photo gallery and videos of the three expert presentations are available to download as a teaching and learning resource.

For further information please contact:

Hilaire Graham
Director for Teaching and Learning
hgraham@ucreative.ac.uk

Craft Entrepreneurship was supported by a Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group (HEEG) Small Project Award. HEEG is funded and supported by SEEDA.