As arts entrepreneurship programs emerge in higher education, many remain idiosyncratic because of a lack of oversight by accreditation organizations. This diversity has spawned a number of philosophical and curricular trajectories in these programs; these different programs reflect the unique microcultures of theater, art, and music units. What has been lacking is a broad understanding of curricular and program development practices and techniques.

The co-editors of Artivate, Gary Beckman and Linda Essig, have shared an interest in advancing arts entrepreneurship as a field of study since Beckman first interviewed Essig as part of his research toward what has become a foundational article (2007) in the field, ""Adventuring" arts entrepreneurship curricula in higher education: An examination of present efforts, obstacles, and best practices." The current article presents a dialogue between them in which they discuss the nature of the discipline and the challenges and opportunities presented by the launch of Artivate.Gary Beckman: You've identified some significant procedural aspects of the field, though I would posit that your larger two-fold conception -a "field of inquiry and practice" -is closer to how the field (in an academic context) is beginning to coalesce and is a useful way to think about Artivate's role in helping to articulate our collective efforts. (Should we add "education" to your fields?) I suggest that answering this is a question of perspective: perhaps emerging and working artists would like to be more "entrepreneurial" and those in higher education would like to 1) help students successfully behave in that manner and 2) determine how arts entrepreneurs act in order to help their students "successfully behave in that manner."The questions of disciplinary positioning concerns those of us in the academy much more than the students we teach -I honestly don't think working artists care what the disciplinary positioning is or is not. Outcome informs process and when we consider where the field "fits in," we fall into the wellrehearsed trap embedded in our arts training: process at all costs.Perhaps we speak the obvious? The field of arts entrepreneurship is at least a hybrid of many possible avenues of disciplinary input -but can stand as its own distinct field of inquiry. We borrow (or should much more) from our 'parent' suffix and process through our prefix. What we tend to forget is that our "product" is aesthetic, thus, our prefix separates us from the business school and our suffix separates us from the arts school, but the beauty of our field is that our title unites the two in a new way. The Higher Education and Working Artist Contexts LE:There seem to be two distinct strands of thinking about arts entrepreneurship that are each reflected only partially in both the academic and practicing artists milieux. The two strands reflect the most prevalent themes that Gartner (1990) identifies in his definitional article: entrepreneurship as new venture creation and entrepreneurship as behavior characterized by opportunity recognition and innovation. The latter seems to translate in the artistic sphere into individual artist self-management and self-actualization. Complicating the issue of domain is the relationship between entrepreneurial behavior by individual artists and organizations and entrepreneurial outcomes (and their measurement).The evolution of the policy environment since the "Culture Wars" of the early 1990s appears to have incenti...

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