A creative passion is often the driving force for creative entrepreneurs. My advice is always to recognise this, in order to understand our own motivations in business. In other words, what ‘makes us tick’. I was asked recently by Putte Svensson from Rockparty in Hultsfred, Sweden, what would be my advice if someone said they …
Category: Development Strategies
1,000 True Fans
Instead of dreaming about having millions of fans, nurture one thousand ‘true fans’. That’s the advice for creative individuals from guru Kevin Kelly. He writes: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 …
Madonna – creative businesswoman
Madonna has recently terminated her contract with Warner Music after 25 years and signed a new contract with tour company Live Nation. Now that digital music is so cheap, not to mention illegal downloads, Madonna recognises that her main income in future will be from performances and related products, not music sales. So she has …
Artistic Passion – combined with Business Focus
Rob Kinsey is an artist with a passion for the sport of motocross, defining himself on his website as ‘motocross racer, fan and award-winning artist’. Art and sport have been important to Rob for many years. He qualified as a technical illustrator in the 1970’s and his artwork has developed in parallel with his participation …
Your world-class ‘Hedgehog Strategy’
Many creative enterprises offer a range of goods or services and regard this as a way of maximising their options and income-generating potential. I understand what they are trying to do. They say it’s a case of ‘keeping your options open’ and ‘casting the net widely’ in order to increase the chances of winning new …
Telling Africa’s Story to the World
Telling Africa’s story from Africans’ point of view is the mission of Africa Media Online, the agency representing African media professionals to the global market. “In the ‘information society’, if we are to create some semblance of global information democracy, it is important that Africans are heard from their perspective,” says Africa Media Online’s David …
Your Creative Business Plan
Let’s make a distinction between planning for a successful creative business and ‘writing a business plan’. The two are not necessarily the same. In my own experience, many people write business plans purely because they are a requirement of investors or funders. These business plans tend to be written without conviction and are then quickly …
Innovating for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
TÉLO is the first public telephone especially designed for public transport vehicles. Using a card for payment, millions of people using public transport are already using the phone on buses, trains and underground transport networks. Founded in August 2004, by Paulo Lerner and André Averbug, Brazilian company PV Inova (Public Vehicular Innovations) invented the system …
Co-opetition – friendly competition
Combining traditional Vietnamese fine art with pioneering technology has created success for VietnamArtist.com, a virtual online gallery based in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Tran Thi Anh Vu (pictured, right), an art gallery proprietor, set up VietnamArtsist.com in 1999, seizing the opportunities offered by e-commerce to develop her business. She engaged the services of an …
Ideas don’t make you rich
“Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.” So says Felix Dennis, poet, owner of Dennis Publishing, and one of the wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs in Britain. I met him several years ago when he gave generously to support a project I helped with at the National Library for the Blind, though he …