This presentation, based on multiple research and educational development projects, focuses on exploring and redefining meaningful entrepreneurial education in the arts and as a foundation novel, diversified partnerships and for expanding the creative professionals career and employment opportunities.

The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 initiative highlights the growing importance of creativity, adaptability, and interdisciplinary collaboration as key competencies in an era of rapid transformation and uncertainty.
 Despite its recognized significance, creative thinking and artistic practices remains underutilized in society, including business environments. On the other hand, entreprenurship education traditionally offered to arts and design students is most often based on growth-minded and results-driven ideologies that arts students find to conflict with their values and professional ideology.

Our artpreneurship research group centralizes ethics, artistic creativity, -knowledge and -sensibilities in designing cross-disciplinary education for starting a business or for tackling sustainability related challenges faced by companies in different sectors of industry.

Artpreneurship education and curriculum development is founded on the notion that artistic and creative expertise is extremely vital and valuable for societies right now because we are navigating an era of unprecedented complexity, rapid change, and disruption. Traditional, linear approaches to problem-solving often fall short in addressing these challenges, while arts open up diverse ways of understanding situations and attending challenges. Artists and creative professionals' expertise introduce tolerance of ambiguity, agility, innovation, holistic ways of communicating and narrating, and life-centric perspectives that are needed to thrive and to build resilience.



The presented research is based on case-studies conducted with companies, service- and technology designers, creative professionals (students and professionals) and academic researchers (law, business, arts and design education) to explore novel solutions for collaboration and cross-sectoral partnerships between artists, creative professionals, businesses and other societal partners. This approach creates a dynamic ecosystem for designing innovative partnerships and sustainable contract solutions.

Findings from case-study research, method & model development are aligned, tested and analyzed through educational development projects that are studied using ethnographic and observation methods. 

As meaningful applicable models for cross-disciplinary artpreneurial education are not available, this research and education program’s objective is to develop these through a multi-project action research design that utilizes data and information from multiple externally funded research and development projects, from courses offered at the authors' university and from research literature (particularly in the fields of arts education, arts administration, creativity research, SDT & psychology, feminist entrepreneurship studies, creative leadership studies and from process-based legal agreement studies) as well as from national, international and EU policies and roadmaps for the creative sector and industry. 

While the whole research group's research questions and foci vary, this presentation focuses on the exploring the educational experiments and findings that answer the following research questions: What kind of entrepreneurial education prepares arts and design students to enter professional partnerships and to establish and sustain careers or their own companies? What types of educational experiences should their professional training include to enable them to work with more diverse partners in fair, equal and ethical terms? What is the ideological foundation for entrepreneurial education that centralizes and respects the ethics, integrity and expertise of artists and creative professionals?

Action research, arts-based leadership methods, arts-based research, multi-case study research design, educational research, design-based research and design thinking, ethnographic methods and micro-ethnography, feminist ethnography, semi-structured interviews, stakeholder engagements and workshops In this study, we design case-based processes specifically to the needs and aims of each case-study, regardless of if it is a project carried out with researchers, artists and companies or a course-based experiment with partner companies and students of diverse educational levels and backgrounds. Essential elements of all our studies are careful observations, documentation (audio, video, photography, field notes) and collective reflection and analysis sessions. Central to our research processes is design-based and visualized collective thinking and analysis. While we initial share our experiences, we visualize all crucial processes to arrive at exact and accurate interpretations and to challenge our own interpretations and conclusions. These design-based analysis tools and processes are also cross-tested from and applied from one purpose to another and to facilitate complexity-based and rhizomatic micro-macro navigation between fields of acquired knowledges.

To overall aim of the educational track of the artpreneurship research is to launch a combination of courses that effectively and meaningfully prepare students for their professional careers in a manner that supports more diverse career paths and helps them establish and maintain sustainable professional practices that match their life and economic expectations. In sum, we aim to establish a program that diversifies the ecosystems in which they feel prepared to navigate. The impact of this development has impact and is influenced by education-, employment- and culture policies at national and EU levels. This is especially urgent development area in times when Finland's unemployment rates are highest in all Europe and Finnish companies are terminated at a record speed. We have been working on these development and research projects for 4-5 years and in two years, we aim to launch a educational programme that aims to empower graduates to see and seek more diverse, potential career options and that will help them establish a career that allows for meaningful balance between work and their personal values.

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