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This paper explores the imprinting of entrepreneurs' motivations on the practices and processes of enterprises. We investigate the question in the context of creative industries (CIs) as an extreme case of entrepreneurial motivations (EMs) prevalence. We analyse the EM of 14 founders of design consultancies. Three EMs emerge: self‐fulfilment, freedom and financial motivation. The qualitative analysis reveals that the founders' EMs at the time of a venture's founding has a lasting impact on the characteristics of the venture (name, processes formalization, decision‐making processes, performance measures and growth strategies). Specifically, founders driven by self‐fulfilment tend to build ventures named after them. In these ventures, processes are informal, decision‐making is centralized, performance measures are based on personal satisfaction and recognition and enterprise growth is restrained. Founders who seek freedom tend to run enterprises with semiformal processes, semicentralized decision‐making, a client satisfaction focus, and slow growth strategies. In contrast, founders with financial motivations tend to create enterprises with formal processes, decentralized decision‐making, financial performance metrics and growth ambitions. By focusing on EM and adopting a holistic approach beyond some characteristics of the venture, we complement the imprinting literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a growing concern in economic geography with the organisational practices of project-based working, involving a multiplicity of organisational and personal social networks. Paralleling this debate has been a growing academic interest in the cultural economy and the conditions of creative work, itself characterized by project-based working. Cultural and creative workers are argued to symbolise contemporary transformations of work more than any other group of workers. However, despite this being a wide trans-disciplinary area of enquiry, little economic geography literature has engaged explicitly with perspectives being developed in other disciplines, in particular sociology and cultural and media studies, on the experience and conditions of work in project-based industries. In this paper I argue for the incorporation of sociological perspectives into our analyses of projects, in order to address the lack of attention to the sociological, political and cultural issues of work. Such an approach, I suggest, can contribute to the economic geography of projects in three ways; first it moves beyond structural analyses to allow for an understanding of the importance of agency in project work; second it allows us to move on from firm-level analyses to develop an understanding of the complex social networks involved in project-based working; and finally it moves on from research at the meso-level on inter- and intra-firm networks to provide micro-level analyses of project work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the identity work carried out by three female owner‐managers in creative industry businesses, identified in Government reports as a discriminatory industrial sector for women in the UK. Through the development of narratives by the owners and other participants, observation of practice and review of online and offline materials, three cases emerged. These showed overlapping, different identities developed and performed through identity work. Each presented rational and logical persona as business leaders despite observation showing extensive use of intuition and gut feeling in both creative and entrepreneurial aspects of the business. Intuition and gut feeling were seen as inappropriate at work as they belonged to the home sphere, emotionally based and therefore automatically unreliable. While occupying male stereotypes and avoiding the female realm of emotion at work, these women expressed femininity through their emphasis on the maternal, 'being a good mother' as a desired ideal being embedded in work as well as home practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative industries are firms which are characterized largely by the labour inputs of creative individuals, and surrounded by a degree of rhetoric as to their significance, but are a comparatively under-researched sector. In this study we developed a research framework which integrated entrepreneurial cognition, entrepreneurial orientation and firm capabilities and explored the relationships between these variables, market conditions and the performance of small creative industry enterprises. The data suggest that high growth small firms are characterized by well-developed internal capabilities allied to an entrepreneurial orientation and that the combination of the various sub-attributes associated with each of these appear to be especially salient under conditions of intense competition. The policies, managerial and educational implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]