About

What are Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs?

A hub in the entrepreneurial sense is a kind of greenhouse for start-ups. In this protected environment, teams with innovative business ideas can be consulted and trained. Hubs are contact points for entrepreneurially thinking and acting people, in which they share, network and mutually benefit from one another.

The Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs of the Goethe-Institut will become centres for creative industry activity in which the start-up consultants trained by the Goethe-Institut and the Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship will advise teams from the cultural and creative industries scene and work with them on their respective start-up ideas.

The Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs will provide a working environment offering not only consulting services, but also workshops, networking meetings and events for the respective creative industries scene. Creative ideas can be promoted, supported and enriched by the intercultural environment in this place. Entrepreneurial thinking in the creative industries here has a place for protected development. A community will emerge that will enable them to convert their creative and innovative businesses into scalable business models.

Through the close networking of the individual Goethe-Institut and links to the creative industries scene in Germany, an entrepreneurial network for cultural businesses will be created that is unique in this form worldwide.

Challenge and Approach to Solutions

Creative entrepreneurs, both nationally and internationally, often apply a project funding logic that is not entrepreneurial. The two-year pilot project Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs aims to tackle this problem. The goal is to link creative industries and entrepreneurship and to strengthen entrepreneurial thinking and acting in the creative industries scene.

To this end, at five pilot locations start-up consultants for the creative industries sector will be trained who will then set up Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs at their locations to advise teams from the creative industries. Start-up ideas with a viable business model, in interdisciplinary teams, with a high degree of innovation and local social and creative relevance will be promoted.

The hubs will thus become powerhouses of the creative industries scene in their own region. Their strength will grow out of international and virtual networking, whereby the international hubs can cooperate continuously with the creative industries scene in Germany.

Vision and Mission

Vision: We enable arts and cultural organisations to be more entrepreneurial so that they can create better society
Mission: We do this through a global network of hubs in which local creatives drive culture and economy

The cooperating partners Goethe-Institut and Strascheg Center for Entrepreneurship will first establish Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs at individual worldwide locations of the Goethe-Institut to train start-up consultants for the cultural and creative industries.

The Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs pilot project addresses the locations in Johannesburg, Jakarta and Thessaloniki, where creative industry businesses will be trained, advised and networked with the German creative industries.

The two cooperating partners are following a shared vision and mission which was formulated and agreed upon in its first 1st Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs Strategy Meeting in
Munich Feb, 28th – March 3rd, 2017.

The Consortium is building Cultural Entrepreneurship Hubs at Goethe-Institut Greece, Indonesia and South Africa.