Jerry Gustafson
Professor: Beloit College
Posted 9.1/2008
You're considered one of the first in higher
education to integrate entrepreneurship education with arts
training. Could you give us a brief sketch of how you came
to this topic?
Thanks for the compliment but I am not sure I am among the
first. I think I was actually a tag-a-long with Joe Roberts
and Gary Ernst. Joe, who is at Columbia College, and Gary,
North Central, were and are colleagues in the Coleman
foundation network of entrepreneurship educators. Joe has
this great job as an endowed entrepreneurship chair in a
department of arts and entertainment in a major arts
school. So he was a natural leader. Anyway, Joe, Gary and I
and others in our group had been talking for some time
about the need to deliver entrepreneurship education to
artists. If artists are going to be successful, they simply
have to be business persons running their own microfirms.
Yet, most artists have an antipathy to commerce.
In the midst of these discussions, the Coleman Foundation
challenged our group to think of important ways to move
entrepreneurship forward. Gary, Joe and I seized the
opportunity to have an entrepreneurship conference designed
specifically to serve student artists’ needs and
temperament. The result was the SEA group, the folks who
sponsor the Self Employment in the Arts conference now
hosted at its North Central headquarters and running
collateral conferences around the country.
That was my first step. It is true, however, that since I
began teaching entrepreneurship in 1984, I have been
fascinated by the similarity between the nature of the
creative quest evinced both by entrepreneur and artist.
Since that first year, I have spent class time having
students try to explain to me why art and entrepreneurship
are different. Both endeavors essentially begin with
nothing, gather resources and ideas to serve their
commitment to create something of value. The only
difference I can determine is that art is more of an
individual, sometimes lonely venture while the medium of
entrepreneurship is almost always organizational.
CELEB is one of the
first (if not *the* first) arts entrepreneurship
incubators in the county. How did it come about?
I had been teaching for 15 years or more and
adopted a rather low profile since the subject was not
always the most welcome in my liberal arts environment. A
change in College administration and the prospect for
funding opened things up. It was time for the next step.
Everybody else was forming centers at the time so I started
thinking about what an entrepreneurship center ought to
look like in a liberal arts college. I had already
determined that, hazardous as it might be, turning students
loose to start their own business was a powerful way to get
them motivated to learn.
So, I knew that an incubator for student businesses would
be the heart of it. But I wanted to attract arts and
communications students along with the more traditional
business-types. I thought the ideal would be to create
place full as possible with equipment and resources that
students could use in many arts based businesses. On
campus, we operated a cable access television station, so I
asked them to come in and partner up. We had a terrific
member of the music faculty who wanted to get into
recording/sound-engineering, so we created a studio for
him. We had a downtown storefront location, so we decided
to put a student-run retail art gallery in the front
windows. One thing followed from another.
For those readers who are not familiar with an
"incubator" in this context, what is the purpose of
incubators for arts students.
The incubator is a place that offers
services to those starting businesses in order to lower
start-up costs. We offer space, utilities, telephone,
internet, conference areas, full amenities, and on-site
consulting services on demand to all our residents. The
artists and arts-based businesses tend to be hardest to
reach break-even, so they need significant subsidy. We have
lots of successes. An English major made lovely marbleized
papers and turned them into notebooks, journals, and wall
hangings. A photographer found a niche photographing
dancers and doing head-shots for student actors. A graphic
designer found she could profitably market her services to
campus clubs and organizations. A couple of groups have
organized to make short films, one of which turned into an
hour-long feature. Two record labels have formed, one still
resident in the Center. We have had more than a dozen such
enterprises in our short history. All the students get
coaching from the two professionals who are resident
counselors, are continually encouraged to operate according
to business principles, to do all the requisite planning,
book and record-keeping and so on. The goal is to make each
individual feel and act as if they are running a business.
The learning is almost all in the doing.
Does CELEB differ in any way from an incubator
found in a typical entrepreneurship unit?
CELEB is a bit different from the
normal incubator, I think, although I am none too sure
what is “normal.” The biggest difference is that most
of these students are not business students. They tend
to have minimal exposure to class room instruction in
the tools of business they are to use. We try to get
them to learn as they need, on the go. Of course, that
is the way many actual entrepreneurs do it. Curricular
support consists of two or three courses and not all
those venturing have had even those. One could argue
that this is not enough. But there are limits to how
much a small college with no significant business
department can do and there is a lot students can
learn on their own if given lots of opportunity and an
occasional push. There is, however, lots of
enthusiasm.
How many students participate in CELEB each year
and what kind of outcomes have you seen for them?
Fifteen to twenty students annually have
participated in real, continuing depth. These are the folks
for whom CELEB is a central college highlight. I
think the progress of these students is amazing. We
are always working to use CELEB as a vehicle for developing
increased confidence and self-agency. We talk about
entrepreneurship as competence in gathering resources
and plans sufficient to realize one’s self-selected
goals and observe that that sort of competence is a
life-skill. Students get it. One of our alumni spent
several years developing a travel magazine for teens
and college-age youth. That effort morphed into a
web-based publication and has become the young woman’s
career. She has seed money, employees… She is doing
it! One of our acting owners of Gallery ABBA was
selected for a major internship in the New York arts
scene. She was chosen from over 100 applicants on the
basis that she had the experience of running her own
gallery in college. I have no doubt that their
interest in pursuing their own ventures increases
markedly. I admit that too much of this view is the
result of testimonials. We have to figure out how to
document these claims.
We have had about fifty students participating yearly.
Students sometimes come to hear speakers or attend other
events. They may join us as we trek to CEO (the Collegiate
Entrepreneurs Organization) in the fall term or to SEA in
the spring. Many come to Gallery openings, or show objects
in the Gallery. Many others come to panel discussions.
CELEB hosts many arts business and
non-arts based ventures. But we also have a resident,
student-run foundation called “the WISE (“What Is
Social Excellence”) Foundation. This group runs as a
business and undertakes the task of learning about the
foundations industry as they pursue their own
interests. WISE promotes a number of campus events
that wind-up relating to social policy, social
entrepreneurship, and so on. The point is that while a
significant number of students get involved in CELEB in real depth, the programs touch
lots of students on campus. Many of those touched have
occasion to wonder what entrepreneurship is, to find
out something from the exposure, and these folks often
follow up. When I first started, “entrepreneurship”
was kind of a bad word on campus. I think we have come
close to overcoming that totally.
Beloit is a small liberal arts college. Do you see
your efforts as an expansion of the liberal arts mission or
meeting the needs of arts students?
I see CELEB as a fulfillment of the
liberal arts mission. Students must not only become
informed, critical thinkers, important as that
obviously is. They must also become more competent
doers and that is where we and other good colleges
tend to fall down. We address a need for arts
students. Students need to understand two things: The
first is that they can turn their passion into a
living and do not need to "sell out" the day after
graduation. The second is that like it or not, they
will be businesspersons and they better learn - at
least a little bit - about how to negotiate that fact.
But this is a need of all students. If we are to help
students to achieve fulfilling lives marked by
excellence in performance and in public service, we
have to give them not only the tools to criticize,
evaluate and think, we need to give them tools to make
their actions effective. What else is college for?
That's CELEB’s special niche.
You've written on entrepreneurship education in
liberal arts environments. Can you see entrepreneurship
education as a valuable experience for those in other
disciplines such as philosophy, rhetoric and the classics?
Entrepreneurship education is valuable for
everybody. Not everybody should become an entrepreneur. But
everyone should have exposure. Having a dream to pursue and
achieve is not a cliche. It is no joke. People really do
do this and it is not rocket science. All students
need to know at least that much. All students need to be
bold about whatever it is that they wish to accomplish.
I would be happy just to be able to help students to
realize that one's life starts now and that they should not
wait for it to begin on the day after graduation
What does entrepreneurship education add to the
liberal arts experience?
It is no small matter that entrepreneurship
education, especially when relying heavily upon
experiential techniques, adds a refreshing change of pace
to the offering of routine, rigorous, academic class work.
When I started, I became immediately aware that some
students who are talented at getting things done are bored
with coursework that calls upon persons to engage in
endless contemplation without ever providing much
opportunity for action. Such students do not perform well
academically as a result and then sell themselves short.
Academic performance is highly rewarded, but their
particular skills are not and they feel badly about it. I
have seen case after case where a student, when offered the
opportunity to sparkle by doing practical organizational
tasks that other often cannot do, experiences a
transformation in self-esteem. That translation then leads,
almost miraculously in some cases, to better performance in
routine class work, too. I often joke that I teach
entrepreneurship as therapy - but actually - there is
something to that.
How has CELEB been received by the arts units at
Beloit?
CELEB has been received fairly well by
the arts departments at Beloit. The acceptance is more
in approval in principle than participation. The fine
artists have gotten involved to a gratifying degree.
They still evince a natural preference for "Art," as
they should, but are willing to encourage kids to show
and sell their pieces. They are not strongly
anti-commerce. Music has been very accepting with a
key resource - an expert willing to supervise sound
engineering. Dance has become involved off and on but,
in truth, has contributed as much as CELEB has to
advising about careers and business aspects of dance.
Theatre, interestingly, has kept its distance. Not
much ideological here, I do not think: one of my best
faculty colleagues is in theatre. But these folks,
frankly, are so busy that I think it is difficult for
them to step too far beyond their intrinsic workload.
You've written that entrepreneurship is an art that
can be taught. Can you expand on this?
The first thing you learn as an
entrepreneurship teacher is that whether at civic meetings,
coffee klatches or cocktail parties, everybody will tell
you entrepreneurship cannot be taught. The belief is that
it is an ingrained spirit - an urge that comes from some
weird collection of psychological traits. The belief is
that entrepreneurs are born, not made. Thinking of
entrepreneurship as an art helps to clarify this whole
issue. Also, people tend to think that great artists and
performers are born, not made. The fact is that one cannot
make someone into a great entrepreneur, just as one cannot
teach someone to be a great pianist or painter. What
teachers endeavor to do is to make persons
not into great pianists or painters but
into better pianists and
painters. Similarly, education can make someone into a
better entrepreneur. It is a philosophy here that people
get better through practice when their efforts are closely
observed and critiqued. So maybe not only is
entrepreneurship an art but also that it can be best taught
the way the arts are taught.
You can email Jerry here.
