Rae, D. (2004). Entrpreneurial learning: a practical model from the creative industries

Rae, D. (2004).  Entrepreneurial learning: a practical model from the creative industries.  Education and Training, 46(8/9), pp. 492 - 500.  Retrieved on June 5, 2010 from http://www.emeraldinsight.com.ezproxy.usq.edu.au/Insight/viewPDF.jsp?contentType=Article&Filename=html/Output/Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Pdf/0040460811.pdf


Introduction: entrepreneurial learning in creative industries
Rae considers what developmental skills entrepreneurs have that are different from mainstream activity, and the subsequent process of learning that higher education can analyse and deconstruct from elements of identity to apply to teaching practice.


The media industry is an environment where communities require members to express creativity and innovation.  Identifying learning processes that are significant to entrepreneurship has led to a conceptual model with practical applications for universities.


Demographics in UK indicate that entrepreneurial business represents 5% of the population.  Entrepreneurial activity is taken to mean the ability to identify an opportunity where the individual can create or amass a product and turn it into a commercially viable enterprise.  It is thought that entrepreneurs live in complex and tumultuous environments (e.g. rapid change, extreme competition, transient networking connections with clients).  The chronic unstable nature of the environment develops skills in entrepreneurs that allow rapid learning techniques to emerge.


While this approach to learning is of significance to understanding communities of practice, it is an area still under-researched.  Definitions of entrepreneur would have to be agreed upon not only by theorists, but by the entrepreneurs themselves.


Research methodology
Gaining insight to entrepreneurs means exploring the differences in life networks to understand how learning is obtained.  Consequently, the rich contextual environments resulted in only three participants selected for the study.


Rae co-authored participant narratives over a two-year period that covered entire life stories, exploring stages to evoke personal and career-related memories.  The comprehensive study included comments participants made about the document.


The framework for entrepreneurial learning
Information collated from the interviews and theoretical interpretation of field research revealed three themes running concurrently: social identity, contextual learning, and negotiated enterprise.


Personal and social emergence of entrepreneurial identity
Rae states that social identity of entrepreneurs is composed of life history, professional identity, familial ties, and the stress of changing 'what is' to 'what might be'.


Opportunity recognition arising from contextual learning
Situation awareness and monitoring leads to recognising the potential of specialised encounters as a process of learning through:

• interpersonal congruence with industry;
• social engagement; and
• praxis of entrepreneurial activity.

The negotiated enterprise
Group collaborative context, process and performance is an evolving and progressive development of negotiated enterprise that includes:

• full active participation and commitment to and clarity of group culture;
• team learning, the framework of activity and performance;
• knowledge networks; and
• flexibility and adaptability to changing roles and function.

Personal and social emergence
Established entrepreneurial identity is able to express a linked sense of purpose to current and future self.  Recognition (e.g. successful performance) allows individuals to transform social identity from who they are to who they could be.


Narrative construction of identity
Rae proposes that as individuals re-invent identity, the potential for entrepreneurial identity to emerge occurs when narratives are altered.  The framework to recreate narratives is posed in the following questions:

1. How would you tell the story of your life (reflect on your past, your present and how you expect your future to be)?
2. In your story, do you feature as an enterprising person who seeks out and takes advantage of opportunities, or as an innovator who experiments with new ideas?
3. How does your identity change as your life story unfolds?

Role of the family
Strong familial ties are fundamental in shaping individual identities and subsequent behaviour.  Constraints and limitations lead to stereotypical behaviour that can be renegotiated with a change of perspective:

1. What are your roles in your family (what does your family expect of you)?
2. How do your family's expectations affect your life, career and entrepreneurial aspirations?
3. How would you wish to change your family's expectations of you?
4. What consequences for your own relationships and future family could result from your choosing an entrepreneurial way of life?

Identity as practice
Activities or hobbies that involve social interaction are good indicators of exploring natural talent.  Experience allows individuals the ability to reflect on developed skills and how they may be used in a different context.  In building a business, entrepreneurs apply who they are to the core of the company:

1. What are you good at doing?
2. How can you best apply your skills, talents and abilities?
3. How can you find the situations, opportunities and people where you can make best use of your capabilities?

Tension between current and future identity
Starting a new business involves dedication to heavy mental workload.  Acceptance of responsibility transforms the individual progressively.  Social and non-work related networks alter to suit current lifestyles:

1. What do you want to achieve from your life at work?
2. Does your existing work environment give you the space and opportunity you need to achieve this?
3. Is there a 'future reality' you want to create which is different from the present? What is this?
4. Do you believe you can make this happen?  How can you start to do this?

Contextual learning
Active participation and self-verification processes afford opportunities that individuals recognise intuitively as a result of goal-setting and situation monitoring.  Learning these skills leads to practical applications of becoming the potential of self, making the most of presented opportunity, and how to negotiate interaction with individuals that is mutually beneficial, and clarity in what cannot be.


Learning through immersion within the industry
Knowledge networks are essential for learning and social interaction.  Exploration leads to practical knowledge that aids developing intuition:

1. What are the most useful skills and expertise you have developed?
2. What intuitive, tacit abilities and skills have you developed, which you use without needing to think about them?
3. What industry and professional relationships, contacts and networks have you formed?

Opportunity recognition through cultural participation
Situation awareness and monitoring develop progressively using intellect, experience, and behaviour.  Projections of future situations based on current events depends on active imagination and the ability to take environmental activity and align it to individual goal potential:

1. What needs and problems do you recognise which could provide possible business opportunities for you?
2. How can your experience and contacts help you to create new opportunities?
3. What ideas do you have for future creative and business possibilities?
4. How could you combine existing knowledge, technology and ideas to create new possibilities?

Practical theories of entrepreneurial action
Based on epistemic and ontological philosophies of 'what works', an individual adapts to a personal style of interaction that is effective within context.  Risk is significantly reduced with practice.  Experience develops a self-assured attitude:

1. 'What works' for you, in developing new ideas and making them happen?
2. How does this work, and why?  Which people does it work with?
3. Are there limits within which it works, or beyond which it stops working?  What have you found these limits to be?
4. What are your 'practical theories' and how could you apply these in a business venture?

The negotiated enterprise
Organisations cannot be run by one person alone.  Communities are dependent upon the self-verification processes that group members commit to.  Knowledge networks are used as a means for social interaction within a professional community:

1. participation and joint enterprise;
2. negotiated meaning, structures and practices;
3. changing roles over time; and
4. engagement in networks of external relationships.

Participation and joint enterprise
As interaction actively engages group members, professional unity is reflected in the outcome of performance.  Entrepreneurs are reliant on teams to function effectively.  Multi-level learning is available as entrepreneurs share who they are (e.g. aspirations and belief in self).  The creative process of sharing vision with group members, and the competency to align members to mission, depends on group values and is of significant interest to researchers.  The shared social learning process becomes altruistic as members put project before self:

1. How effectively do you work with others in agreeing and working towards shared goals?
2. Do you know what your preferred role and strengths are in a team venture?  What are you best at?
3. How well are you able to put the team's interests ahead of your own?
4. How do you recognise and employ the abilities of others - even when you disagree with their methods?

Negotiated meaning, structures and practices
Transactive memory becomes cumulative knowledge of individual best practice policy (e.g. what works).  Aligning to community culture becomes a mediated effort of attracting members to group.  Discord is inevitable as individuals settle in.  Emotional attachment is an outcome of strong community spirit, which is the energy of the organisation:

1. What works for you and others within a shared project: how do you share goals, values and ways of working?
2. How do you stimulate and sustain the emotional life of the venture (the passion, buzz, excitement and fun)?
3. How do you turn individual learning into shared learning?
4. How do you manage conflict and disagreement to positive effect?

Changing roles over time
As an organisation grows larger, learning and interpersonal congruence develop commensurately.  Transitions change group culture as individuals adjust to a restructuring of power and relationship networks.  Rae proposes that individuals indoctrinated with characteristics or traits associated with entrepreneurial skill are self-sustaining during unstable periods and capable of maintaining clarity and responsibility towards managing daily activity.


Good management skills enable organisations to identify functional experts who are vital to the development and growth of a community.  The strength of community culture is determined by novice members' ability to adapt:

1. Can you accept that your role and others roles will change as the business grows?
2. How easily can you learn to let go and entrust important roles to others?
3. How well can you integrate new people into the business?
4. How would you deal with situations where people you have worked with since the start have not grown with the business, and their skills no longer fit?

Engagement in networks of external relationships
The benefit of interpersonal congruence between group members has effects on external relationships (e.g. interaction with client).  By engaging the client, the dynamics of the relationship alters with the customer adopting proactive communication.  Listening and having empathy for the client maintains close ties.  Community culture is perpetuated through external networks that reciprocally enhance identity awareness:

1. What are the most important external relationships for the enterprise?  With whom, and why?
2. What are your expectations of them and theirs of the business?  Are these realistic and can they be met or, if not, renegotiated?
3. How is the customer engaged in the life of the business?
4. How could the external representation and relations with the business be improved with key groups and individuals?
5. Are there gaps in the external relationships and what actions are needed to fill these?

Implications of the model
While there is mounting evidence that entrepreneurial training in higher education is required, there is little practice-based theory to use as a design platform.  Content and context structure is shifting from 'teaching the abstract of entrepreneurism' to 'heuristic learning for entrepreneurs'.  Rae proposes the model is used in practice-based communities as it is viable in training programs that support fledgling business.  Entrepreneurs in media "developed informal and intuitive theory in practice and ... valued context specific hermeneutic, reciprocal and dialogic forms of learning" (pg. 8).


Although the study has focused on the media industry, the process of learning is general to human beings.  Context and values are situated within the group or community and are the signifying elements of an organisation.