ECON 327.003 – Entrepreneurship in the Arts
KMB 3029 | Tues/Thurs, 2:00 pm
Professor Ken Weiss
Want to learn more about how to be a trailblazer in the arts? How to manage your career, start new artistic ventures, and how to be an effective leader in the arts? This course is for you!
The goal of this course is to provide students with the tools necessary to become effective arts leaders and to understand what is required to succeed in entrepreneurial arts ventures. The course will provide students with opportunities to conceptualize, write, and in collaboration with others, present formal business plans for entrepreneurial ventures in the arts. Each student will be assigned to a team to develop a business plan for an arts venture, such plans to include mission statements, personnel analyses, financial analyses, marketing plans, and issues concerning intellectual property rights. For each of these topics, students will examine the challenges and changing nature of entrepreneurship and innovation that are unique to the arts. For example, students will gain an understanding of how intellectual property rights protect creative expression and how they can honor and reference the work of others without infringing creative rights. A goal of this course is to provide examples of entrepreneurial challenges and explore how arts industry leaders address them. We invite leaders in the various arts industries to join our classes and provide students with opportunities to interact with such leaders, to develop contacts, and to pursue internships in a continuing effort to prepare them for potential careers in the arts. We will explore special topics from the music, film, television, theatre, live performance industries, and others. Our guests variously include prominent people from the music, film, television, and theatre, and other arts industries – all of whom candidly discuss their experiences and take questions and comments from students. As careers in music can dovetail into other major media, we place some emphasis on the music industry and its practices to include copyright, artistic rights, licensing, fees and royalties, issues that must be understood in the formal use of music in any media. Overall, students will learn to navigate challenges prevalent in arts entrepreneurship, such as crafting meaningfulness, audience cultivation, social media presence, marketing and issues unique to each genre.
The Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship, http://shuford.unc.edu/
This program is for the problem-solver, the creator, the agent for change and innovation. Our students come from all majors and different walks of life — because any students with the desire to innovate can be successful in our program.
The track courses are designed to provide students with the opportunity to delve deeper into a particular application of entrepreneurship. In the case of the Arts track, it’s about the development and implementation of an arts concept whether for specific skills and/or the business structure for such a concept. In these courses, students will work in teams to develop their own projects around the topics of the track. This course will act as a springboard for students to make their ideas a reality through the careful mentorship and support of our expert EIRs (Entrepreneurs in Residence).