Entrepreneurship Engagement in the Arts: The Role of Incubators and Social Media Influencers

Abstract

The acknowledgement that entrepreneurship is crucial for economic and social development drives a growing number of educational programs that focus on a wide range of audiences. Nevertheless, some communities are less receptive to entrepreneurship education than others, which hurts the economic potential of their members. This paper focuses on the community of artists, whose members rarely self-identify as entrepreneurs, despite the many similarities between entrepreneurship and artistic careers. This has triggered the creation of educational programs offered by arts incubators aiming to increase the entrepreneurial mindset and awareness among artists. The novelty of these programs explains the absence of metrics to measure the efficacy of their educational offerings on the entrepreneurial awareness among artists. This study proposes a new methodology to assess the impact of arts incubators’ entrepreneurial programs. Based on social theory, the methodology measures the awareness through the analysis of social media posts of incubatees and influencers who graduated from arts incubator programs. The results provide evidence that social media influencers (SMIs) and incubatees do not engage in entrepreneurial-related discussions, thus suggesting that arts entrepreneurship-centric programs are not effective in raising entrepreneurial awareness among artists. The results and implications of these findings are discussed.