EEUK

One day conference for the latest thinking on enterprise education for the creative and media industries.

University experts in creative enterprise descended on Birmingham this May to debate how courses in creative entrepreneurship can improve and help to revitalise the creative sector.

Now in its 3rd year, Birmingham City University's Creative Enterprise Conference (creativeconference.wordpress.com), featured a keynote talk from author of Entrepreneurship and the Creative Economy: Process, Practice and Policy, Collette Henry.

Teaching entrepreneurship to creative and media students is relatively new and this conference was able to focus on some key issues. "There's an emerging interest in entrepreneurship for the creative industries, which reflects the nature of work in this sector, namely freelance and portfolio careers" says Annette Naudin of Birmingham City University's School of Media. "We need to explore different methods for teaching and research to offer our students the best opportunities as they develop their careers in the creative sector."

The day long Creative Enterprise Conference featured a mix of keynote speakers, presentations and in-depth discussions to explore how creative enterprise courses can help the sector meet these big challenges.

Highlights from the conference included Fabrice Hyber presentation on his educational experiment, a project supported by the EU funded ECCE project. Fabrice is an established French artist originally from Nantes and he is currently working with the Nantes School of Fine Art on a project entitled 'Les Realisateurs', the producers. The project is an experiment in education as it brings together the art school and the local business and management school who will contribute to his unique project - developing relationships between artists and local businesses.

As part of the conference it was important to have a contribution from a creative entrepreneur and Andy Hartwell from Substrakt gave us a very good insight into the developments of his business Substrakt. Andy is an alumni of BCU's MA in Media and Creative Enterprise and set up his business just before he joined the MA programme. Delegates where particularly interested in Andy's story, including the challenges and opportunities he has faced.

The event was organised by Birmingham City University's School of Media, in collaboration with Enterprise Educators UK, and funded by ECCEi Interreg1VB.