Innovation in the creative industries: Linking the founder's creative and business orientation to innovation outcomes

Abstract

Creative industries contain paradoxes because conflicting tensions arise between the market and the arts. Entrepreneurs need to find and maintain a balance between those two sides to create innovation. This study tests the interaction between business and creative orientations of a founder in their influence on innovation in the context of creative entrepreneurial firms and provides recommendations for how creative agents can leverage and manage their innovations based on their creative visions. Determinants on the individual level, such as the founder's creative or business orientations, have a lasting impact on the practices and process of their venture. To trace the imprinting influence of the founder's orientation on innovation, the empirical setting is a time‐lagged study of German firm owners in the cultural and creative industries surveyed 5 years apart. The results show a significant relationship between creative orientation and innovation, whereas business orientation does not significantly relate to innovation. However, creative and business orientations reveal a negative interaction effect. This study contributes empirical evidence to the paradox theory and the interaction between the opposite poles. Our findings provide valuable insights about the relevance of creative orientation and its visionary impact on the firms' innovation process. Furthermore, the results shed new light on the tension between art and the market, as different compositions of the two orientation poles seem to have a varying impact on the degree of innovation. Thus, the study reveals the complexity of creative entrepreneurship and provides managerial guidance for other knowledge‐based industries.

Goal orientation and business model innovation in dynamic environments: Evidence from the creative industries

“…Highlighting that learning rather than performance orientation facilitates BMI brings a different perspective to prior research, which has usually linked the enhancement of strategic goals to a focus on the economic viability of ideas rather than on learning per se (DeFillippi et al, 2007). Overall, our findings allow us to contribute to the exploration of the microdeterminants of innovation (Koch et al, 2023), highlighting the conditions that might stimulate the development of new capabilities to innovate BMs (Loon et al, 2020).…”

“…Second, by exploring managers' orientations, we also more generally contribute to recent research on the micro-determinants of innovation (e.g., Koch et al, 2023;Palmié et al, 2023) when contrasting goals co-exist (Bergamini et al, 2018). We specifically respond to the call of scholars to understand how dynamic and interwoven polarities influence innovative processes (Koch et al, 2023).…”

“…Companies in other sectors operating at the intersection of creative and commercial goals (e.g., high-tech companies and knowledge-based companies) can leverage our findings to increase their learning opportunities and facilitate BMI. In particular, creative sectors can be taken as examples of high innovativeness and best practices for BMI can be exported to other industries (Koch et al, 2023;Messeni Petruzzelli & Savino, 2015).…”

“…innovate BMs once they are designed and established (Koch et al, 2023;Landoni et al, 2020;Rozentale & Van Baalen, 2021). To fill this gap, we go beyond earlier studies on BM design, and we focus on the process of business model innovation (BMI;Heikkilä et al, 2018).…”

“…This link has not been fully explored (Snihur & Zott, 2020), given the complexity to relate the multifaceted organizational changes of BMI to managerial choices (Alshawaaf & Lee, 2020;Kaulio et al, 2017). This gap is also relevant for creative industries research, where prior studies have fallen short on explaining the complex association between characteristics of individual creatives and innovation outcomes of the company as a whole (Jones et al, 2016;Koch et al, 2023). Highlighting that learning rather than performance orientation facilitates BMI brings a different perspective to prior research, which has usually linked the enhancement of strategic goals to a focus on the economic viability of ideas rather than on learning per se (DeFillippi et al, 2007).…”