Creativity: A Bit of Fun? How About Our Economic Future, Creative Entrepreneurs

By Carolyn Dailey, who is the author of The Creative Entrepreneur, published by DK, 6 February 2025.

Which industrial sector is a top contributor to the global economy? And growing faster than others? In which, within its global milieu, Europe rivals its equivalent sector in the US, the world’s biggest economy? 

Must be tech? Financial services? Auto manufacturing?

Bond, James Bond. Taylor Swift. The Crown. Grand Theft Auto. LVMH.

The creative sector is a powerhouse success commercially across the globe — and at a rapidly accelerating rate. In the UK alone, it is the second biggest economic contributor (after financial services) and growing 3 times faster than the economy as a whole. But listening to mainstream conversation, you’d never know it. 

The Creative Entrepreneurs

A key reason is because “business” remains a dirty word in the creative sector, hidden in the shadows of what is considered “selling out creatively” – or at a minimum, seen as a boring distraction from creativity.

Quite the opposite is true. 

Good business empowers creativity. It is by harnessing business that creative people empower themselves to bring their full creative vision to life. Business is the servant, not the master, of bringing creativity into the world.  

That this fact isn’t grasped by the mainstream is highly damaging in a number of ways.

First, people often don’t realise they can make a living from a business based on their creativity, and instead assume they must restrict it to a hobby. Likewise, parents commonly discourage their children from building careers in the creative sector, fearing they’ll be destined to become “starving artists”. These factors contribute to the idea that it’s only people with access to independent financial resources and inside connections who can make careers in the creative sector.

Add to that the pressure on educators to cut creative subjects because they’re not perceived as contributing commercial value to graduating students, and the inability of policymakers to grasp the economic power of the creative industries — lumping them together – not with the wider business sector – but instead with the publicly supported “arts.” Plus the view from investors that creative businesses are inherently unpredictable and not scalable — and you’ve got a misunderstanding on an epic scale.

 For creative people, this makes for a mass of untapped potential and unrealised dreams. For the world at large, it makes for greatly diminished access to the delight and inspiration derived from the full range of creativity that could (and should) be out there.

How to break through these giant misconceptions? 

 First, by re-claiming the word “entrepreneur.” It has taken on a negative connotation in the creative sector, conjuring up images of Silicon Valley tech bro’s and cigar-smoking, super-yacht-owning tycoons. Entrepreneurship – as defined by creatives on their own terms – is something they should be proud of and embrace as a means to fulfil their creative potential. While also continuing to identify, primarily and proudly, with their creative discipline: “I’m a fashion designer,” “I’m an architect,” “I’m a film producer,” “I’m a musical artist” – as it should be.

Second, by spreading widespread awareness of the massive commercial success and potential of the creative sector to creative people, their parents, educators, policymakers and investors.

The best way to do this is by telling the so-far untold entrepreneurial stories of the most innovative and exciting creative role models. Currently, in mainstream conversation, when successful creative people are spoken of, it’s about their creative output. That’s completely understandable as that’s the most exciting thing about what they do and appeals most to audiences. But it means that their entrepreneurial business story doesn’t get told. 

That’s the mission of The Creative Entrepreneur – to finally bring these entrepreneurial stories to life in a way that creative people can relate to and parents, educators, policymakers and investors can finally see the commercial value of the creative sector.