Abstract
The vital role of entrepreneurship for economic growth and its impact for job creation in mature and developing economies is widely recognized and quantified (OECD, Entrepreneurship and Business Statistics, 2015).According to Get2growth data (How Many Startups Are There?, 2015), 100 million start-ups are created each year of which 1.35% are technology-based companies, and according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity (Fairlie, 2013), almost a quarter of new businesses in the USA were started by entrepreneurs aged 55 and older.Survival following failure data for start-ups are numerous and complex in the interpretation, and data presented by the Statistic Brain (Startup business failure rate by industry, 2015) show a 55% failure rate within the fifth year.Entrepreneurship is important for growth but sustainable entrepreneurship is hard to achieve.This paper, by means of a case study of a German private art museum “Kunstmuseum Gehrke-Remund”, analyzes the disruptive methods, both atypical and contrary to the mainstream art industry, developed to ensure the sustainable success of such an innovative endeavor. Our analyses and results contribute to the understanding of the building blocks and roadmap designed by the Kunstmuseum to successfully enter the elitist contemporary art industry, as an outsider, and provide an early indication that such methods can be theoretically replicated in other industries by other entrepreneurs.
Highlights
The selection of the Vitruvian Man (Gallery of the Academy in Venice, dated approximately in 1490) as the title and as the basic reference for this paper, has the aim to highlight the interrelation between art and science, and the close relationship between both forms of activity with the economy sector and entrepreneurship.Since 1776, the year in which Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations” up to the work by Samuelson “Foundations of Economic Analysis” (1947) and up to modernRemund et al Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2017) 6:17 times, economy and business fields have sought their own space as scientific or as an organized and systematic knowledge and have emphasized that the essential purpose of the entrepreneur or businessman is to earn profits
It is certainly necessary to be efficient in the use of resources and be able to obtain the relevant information from markets to offer the products wherever there is the highest demand; this search for profits, as the only important objective leaves—concealed in a black box—everything which demonstrates the close similarities between creativity, art, science and entrepreneurship
Contemporary art museums exhibit the same artists, share the same business model of temporary exhibitions, exhibit the artworks in buildings designed by famous architects, but they display art in the same aesthetic method in the style called “white cube” with the result that in New York, London, Basel or Baden-Baden, most contemporary art museums have polished wooden floors, plain white walls, light from above, glass and marble; a few wooden benches for visitors to sit on are usually located in the center of the rooms so they do not interfere with the artworks
Summary
The selection of the Vitruvian Man (Gallery of the Academy in Venice, dated approximately in 1490) as the title and as the basic reference for this paper, has the aim to highlight the interrelation between art and science, and the close relationship between both forms of activity with the economy sector (production and trade) and entrepreneurship. In the face of increasing financial pressure, contemporary art museums, regardless whether public or private, face the same survival challenge; this challenge is shared with any struggling industry which tries to find solutions by seeking new business models to support operations or tries to develop attractive offerings which appeal to the changing tastes and expectations of their customers. Contemporary art museums exhibit the same artists, share the same business model of temporary exhibitions, exhibit the artworks in buildings designed by famous architects, but they display art in the same aesthetic method in the style called “white cube” with the result that in New York, London, Basel or Baden-Baden, most contemporary art museums have polished wooden floors, plain white walls, light from above, glass and marble; a few wooden benches for visitors to sit on are usually located in the center of the rooms so they do not interfere with the artworks. The methodology employed in the case study includes the collection of the background knowledge of the museum, semi-structured interviews with the organization management, its associates and suppliers, evaluation of visitors’ written feedback, observation of visitors behavior as well as the artifacts analysis of the museum’s collection
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