Economics and Profiling of Contemporary Creativity

Creativity is today defining boundaries of cultural industries in Europe and out of Europe. Creativity does not include only performing and visual arts but also material culture, tangible and intangible heritages, education, television, knowledge intensive industries, advertising, etc. The creativity can be both for-profit and not-for-profit, too. Taking into account multiple features of creative industries, the debate among lecturers, policy-makers and researchers is never ending. While the boundaries of the concept ‘culture’ are vanishing in ‘creativity’, main strategies of cultural and creative entrepreneurs are evolving, too. Above all, revenue maximization and diversification are leading the not-for-profit creativity out of the contemporary crisis of resources and funds. Thanks to a k-means clustering we investigated 2012’s costs and revenues of a sample of the USA creativity: museums, symphony orchestras, theatres, universities and public televisions. Four main profiles emerged according to performances of marketing, fundraising, investing and other financing. Bigger clusters are the marketing expert and the revenue diversifier, this profile at a loss. The revenue diversifier of a less crowded cluster is the most profitable and the most solvent, instead. The fundraiser is not the most crowded cluster but he profits by the second highest gain of the sample.