In times of prevalence on tertiary education in life sciences, engineering and technology, arts HEIs receive insufficient attention and their role quite often is underestimated. In this context, art academies traditionally lack internal capacity and resources to implement rigorous processes to meet the knowledge economy and labour market demands. Moreover, arts HEIs differ from traditional HEIs in a sense that the major focus is on the development of the students’ artistic skills and talent which is mostly acquired by doing (creating, painting, drawing, sculpturing, etc.) rather than listening, reading and writing. Moreover, the mind-set, perceptions and attitudes of arts students differ considerably from those of students of other disciplines. Usually traditional business courses are based on general business principles and knowledge that has been developed by business academics.

Acknowledging the need for the development of entrepreneurial skills of their arts students, the project partners have defined the need and have committed to implement the project with the overall objective: to equip students of arts HEIs with entrepreneurial skills for their successful transition to the world of business and work of the 21st century.

PROJECT SOLUTION AND RESULT

The attainment of the project objective would involve the development of a study module for arts students within the arts training context “Applied Entrepreneurship in Creative Industries of the 21st century”, that will provide them with the basic knowledge on entrepreneurship, marketing and intellectual property and the relevant skills for the world of work. The study module will be based on empirical studies on the skills that arts students lack upon the completion of their degrees and their needs in the labour market. Furthermore, the module will be developed based on the knowledge of the diverse environments in certain European countries – Latvia, Poland and Portugal, so as make it universal in terms of its content and implementation for use by any other EU arts HEIs.

The intended study module would be based on interactive hands-on learning in an informal setting and it would:

• Take the students through all the principal business life-cycle stages simulating a real-world challenge;
• Be visited by practitioners (mentors) in creative industries of the respective countries;
• Foresee a certain degree of involvement of students of all three countries in the pilot module to provide the training in collaborative work in an entrepreneurial setting;
• Involve a study visit to certain companies representing creative industries nationally;
• Involve extensive inter-team collaboration by applying ICT for student brainstorming and project implementation needs;
• And consequently equip the arts students with knowledge and understanding of business processes.