NESTA’s success investing in the business ideas of creative graduates has developed a new model of support that is being rolled out in Scotland, the North East, the Midlands and Northern Ireland. NESTA’s Mark Fenwick gives ther background on Insight Out...

In 2003 NESTA (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) decided to investigate the area of graduate entrepreneurship.

NESTA realised that compared with the USA the UK produced a significantly smaller number of graduates that started companies particularly in the Creative Industries.  Following further research the Creative Pioneer Programme (CPP) was formed. This would spend three years understanding what barriers recent graduates from creative industry courses faced when starting a business and developing a model to help address the issues.  

The approach was to develop and support a number of graduates through the start up process. The aim was to take thirty graduates with pioneering ideas and transforming them into people with enough business knowledge to create a business proposal which was sufficiently robust to merit further funding of up to £35,000. The challenge was to create new approaches to the task, test them and then disseminate what had been learnt to a wider audience of creative industry business support agencies, Higher Education institutions and enterprise agencies.

When approaching this challenge CPP made some initial assumptions:

• creative graduates there was a high propensity towards self employment.
• is a tension between creative expression and commercial realities
• is a high level of dyslexia amongst creative graduates
• high proportion of creative graduates had a particular action orientated learning style
• business start up process if taught in an intense way would fit well with this action oriented learning style.

Alongside these assumptions we discovered that there was also a tension between creative graduates and traditional approaches to explaining the start up process. The graduates were unable to really articulate what it was they wanted to do and traditional language and approach to business start up was a hindrance to them overcoming this barrier.

CPP has developed and tested a different approach to business start up which draws upon creative graduates existing skills to imagine, draw, and feel their way around problems. They have created a framework which sees planning and producing a business proposal as a distinct act of creativity and they have expressed this in language which is more typical to the art and design school than to area of business start up. The approach has been refined and tested on seventy recent graduates, and evaluated by the Scottish Institute of Entrepreneurship and Glasgow School of Art.

The approach uses three models to develop an idea into a business idea. Each stage builds on the assumptions of the stage before testing those assumptions in an iterative manner.

The three models are:

Evidence modelling is a process where you are asked to produce a vision of success for you business. It does this by asking you to look into the future and draw an example of your vision coming true.
E.g. if you are driven by growth an example may well be an invitation to the opening of your new design office in Japan.

Blueprint modelling is a process of drawing an operational plan for the business at that future stage.

Relationship modelling is the process of mapping the interaction of four key areas that play a role in any business, in order to identify a business model out of thirteen archetypes. Once done you can begin to look at the limitations and critical factors for success for the business.

We describe these areas as follows.
• – this role describes the process of forming and synthesizing ideas.
• – this role describes the process of transforming raw materials, in our case ideas.
• - this role describes the purchase of finished products or services for resale or the co-ordination and distribution of finished products or services. 
• – this role receives, buys, or consumes an item and or service.

The three models allow someone to begin to articulate their vision for the business, how it will operate and what the critical activities are in a business. The purpose of the exercises is to make the business ideas start to appear on paper, but not as a series of vision and mission statements but as a series of drawings. This initial articulation is nearly always the first time that participants are able to articulate what they want to do as a business. From this articulation it becomes easier to test the assumptions and consequences surrounding the business idea, and start on further iterations to refine and make more robust the business idea.

The models have been developed into a five week training programme called Insight Out. Initially piloted in Glasgow the programme is now up and running in three further regions the North East, Midlands and Northern Ireland. The models have been adapted and absorbed into a professional development curriculum at Glasgow School of Art with the intention of making available the curriculum to other art and design colleges. Thirty people from creative industry agency and business support organisations across the UK have been trained to deliver the Insight Out models as part of a business start up programme. 

NESTA has developed support material which helps any institution seeking to hold an Insight Out training programme. This will be available on NESTA’s website by the end of this year.

For more information on NESTA, CPP and Insight Out, got to www.nesta.org.uk/pioneers

Martin Fenwick, is Head of Creative Pioneer Programme,
NESTA. He will be speaking at this years Creative Clusters Conference in Belfast, from 24–26 October. For further information, www.creativeclusters.com