Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts
Volume 3, Issue 1
http://artivate.org
pp. 49-50
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BOOK REVIEW

Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Changing Currents in Education and Public Life.
Lynn Book and David Peter Phillips, editors.
Reviewed by Susan Badger Booth, Eastern Michigan University
Creativity and Entrepreneurship is a powerful collection of essays “examining creativity
and entrepreneurship both separately and synergistically.” The introduction focuses on two
primary concerns:
1) How can individuals - as global citizens - foster highly creative, critically active and
socially accountable practices to co-create a just and imaginative world?
2) How can creativity and entrepreneurship animate institutional and social bodies to build a
humane, vivid and interdependent world?
These two large issues could easily be construed as overreaching in scope for such a
collection. However, Book and Phillips approach the subject with a thoughtful interpretation of
current research, a skillful assemblage of new perspectives, and a clear call for further research
and engagement with a broad community of academics and practitioners.
It is worth noting that this collection is the outcome of two national conferences:
Creativity: Worlds in the Making, 2009 and Teaching Creativity in Higher Education: Current
Trends and Critical Encounters, 2011. The authors advise that “both conferences corroborated
current research and practice, reframing creativity as inherently interdisciplinary and crosssectoral,” which establishes an important access point for contributors as they address the
volume’s two significant themes. Obviously, this confirmation places the importance of
creativity first with “entrepreneurship as a particularly able partner for creativity and an
important mechanism for social change.”
The editors conclude their introduction by inviting the reader to see beyond a limited,
discipline-specific definition of creativity as only a tool for the sculptor or actor. Instead, they
suggest “allying with entrepreneurship studies to produce economic and social value in new
ways.” The collection moves forward in three sections: “Reimagining Higher Education:
Creative Experiments in Teaching & Learning”, “Disciplinary Immigrants: Strategies in
Creative Process & Practice” and “Public Engagement & the Duty of the Imagination.”
Beginning with a powerful chapter on “Creativity in the liberal arts,“ Lynn Book
describes a semester-long project where she engages with students as part of a gateway course
for Wake Forest University’s Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise degree program. Her
“Concept for Transformative Practice . . . is designed to disrupt patterns and to foster
experiments with even the most mundane actions to stimulate creative potential.” Book
reinforces the collection’s call to action in the introduction by moving smoothly between
research and practice and making an impassioned case for thoughtful creative theory and
essential creative practice.
This first section includes an innovative chapter describing an interdisciplinary
collaboration between physical geography and creative writing in Heidi La Moreaux’s chapter
“Natural history meets personal history: CLORPT, cores and reference slides.” In this chapter,
La Moreaux offers “scientific ways of viewing the world . . . allowing writers and artists to
examine factors that influenced their formation, the chronology and texture of events in their
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Copyright © 2013, the author

Badger-Booth
Book review: Creativity and Entrepreneurship
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lives and their value systems and beliefs more objectively and comprehensively.” Using
geological core samples as a metaphor for writing personal histories, La Moreaux asks students
to create a “core diagram of their life.” She suggests “creative writing teachers frequently lament
that most students tell rather than show their ideas . . . metaphors of cores and reference slides
may provide fresh ways to explore personal history and autobiographical writing.”
In the second section, the editors include a chapter on imaginary worldplay, describing
how a tool that “manifests spontaneously in childhood as part of the normal development of
imaginative play” can be translated into formal curriculum for an older audience. “As a means
of teaching learnable processes of pretense, imagination and knowledge construction, classroom
initiatives in worldplay can purposefully take their place in part of a larger educational strategy
to foster creative and inventive skills.”
Moving from worldplay to theatrical process and creation as a method for developing
creative cognition, Carolyn Roark, Kevin Daum and Mary Abrahams title their chapter: “How to
develop an entrepreneur: Teaching creative process management in the academy and industry.”
Reflecting on creativity as a cognitive act, they suggest we are all capable of creativity - the trick
is having the tools to unlock this natural talent. The authors continue to playfully correlate
theatre’s creative cycle into an accessible model for enhanced creative cognition. Their broad
applicable outcomes include: “1) Identifying disparate parts, 2) Envisioning how they can work
together to provide value, 3) Organizing the process and resources required, and 4) Executing
and sharing with others who can gain the value.”
The third section of the book, although not as strong as the previous two, contains some
important essays. One such gem is “The Empathy Imperative” by Lyndo Rego and Philipp Essl,
which takes what some might perceive as a soft skill and elevates its importance through
supporting research and skillful synthesis. Rego and Essl take a next step, however, in
suggesting that emotional intelligence is not just measurable and important, but can be
developed. They describe programs at the Center for Creative Leadership that “cultivate
empathy by helping individuals to understand their identity and values and to share them with
others.”
Accompanying the Rego and Essl chapter is Scott Sherman’s practical essay “Training
the next generation of social entrepreneurs.” Sherman is the Executive Director of the
Transformative Action Institute. He reflects on the plethora of college courses that analyze social
problems and the huge void of courses that offer solutions to solve these problems. After years of
studying social change, Sherman’s organization developed a curriculum encouraging college
students to establish social ventures. He discovered that students are not prepared to initiate a
social venture and instead need to develop skills in “resilience – overcoming adversity, barriers
and challenges, grit – perseverance, hard work and task commitment; creativity and innovation;
and relationship–building and networking.”

Though Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Changing Currents in Education and
Public Life may be weighted a bit too heavily on the side of higher education, it takes a
significant step forward in connecting theory and practice. Instead of simply publishing
more examples of creativity-building exercises and business plan development scenarios,
Creativity and Entrepreneurship bravely suggests why this is important to us -, all of us -,
both inside and outside of higher education. This reviewer highly recommends taking
time to read through this at times dense, but often-enlightening, little book and will be
looking forward to additional volumes.
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Artivate 3 (1)

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