The Aesthetics of Entrepreneurship: How Arts Entrepreneurs and their Customers Co-create Aesthetic Value

Abstract

Despite the fundamental role customers play in entrepreneurial creation processes, little is known about how value emerges from interactions and collaborations between entrepreneurs and their customers. We begin to address this question by exploring the relational and embodied processes through which entrepreneurs and their customers interact to co-create aesthetic value. On the basis of an 11-month multi-sited micro-ethnography of arts entrepreneurs, we abductively derive three interrelated processes: imagining, contemplating, and consensus building. Our key insight is that the customer plays a vital role throughout the entrepreneurial creation process: neither the entrepreneur nor the customer has the final say; rather, their embodied experiences combine with an evolving product to co-create aesthetic value.