You can read the transcript of the Penny Podcast below here or listen to it on Spotify.
Eva Keogan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Penny Podcast.
My name is Eva Keogan, and I’m joined here today by Adrian De La Court and Siân Prime from Goldsmiths University, before we do the introductions, I just wanted to say that we have had a bit of a rebrand here at the Penny Podcast.
We started in 2020 as a way for, people who were on the master’s for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship to document their entrepreneurship journey during lockdown and what a crazy time that was. Here we are in 2024, the Penny Podcast now is for creatives, technologists and disruptors. All the stories, all the background, all the exciting and gory innards of running your own business will be up for discussion.
And I would like now to pass over to Adrian and Siân, who are, the powerhouses of creative entrepreneurship in the UK. Please Adrian, tell me a little bit about, about your role and let everyone know what you do.
Adrian De La Court: Hi Eva, thank you for having [00:01:00] us. Privileged to be here with you. I’m Adrian. I am the Course Director for the MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, as you know, because you were with us at Goldsmiths University of London, currently in the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship. I’m also the director of a program called Synapse, which takes, our way of working with entrepreneurs and rolls that toolkit and methodology out across the university to work with students and academics from other departments. But also, we’ve expanded that as a programme outside of the university. I’m the Director of the Business Development Scheme, an incubator scheme that we have as part of our department where we nurture and support alumni who are developing their own businesses, both who have a Tier 1 Visa and are also UK residents. That’s what I currently do.
Eva Keogan: That’s a really, really interesting role. And Siân, tell us about yourself.
Siân Prime: Hello again. [00:02:00] I have a split role, not as split as Adrian. I work with Adrian on the MA for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship. And this is new news. I’m currently Head of the Institute of Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship and I’m also academic lead for enterprise across the whole of the university. I think what that means is that while Adrian is developing Synapse and delivering it to students, I’m working to try and encourage an entrepreneurial, social innovation, thinking across Goldsmiths with academics, our professional services colleagues, and then Adrian and I collaborate together on Synapse externally. We’re really working to think about how we can make as much from all the resources that we have at Goldsmiths to make as much impact as we can.
Eva Keogan: Congratulations. That’s really great news. That’s very interesting that your role is becoming cross organisational. I wanted to ask you about your [00:03:00] views on entrepreneurs. You two are very entrepreneurial yourselves. I would be interested to hear what that would involve, because we know Goldsmiths, it’s been widely reported, has been severely impacted post lockdown and also there are many other things going on in geopolitics that we won’t go into now, but, I’ll put some links to the Guardian articles, and I’ve been quite vocal about it myself on LinkedIn.
This entrepreneurial mindset. It’s always quite difficult in academia, from my experience. I’ve worked with businesses that are perhaps rolled out of departments, and there is a different attitude. Academia and business are two different things, and I think they should be. So, you must be facing quite a few challenges there.
Siân Prime: Yeah, I mean, thank you for all of that, and thank you for everything you’re doing in terms of amplifying what needs to be amplified about what’s happening to, not just Goldsmiths, but really anywhere that’s trying to teach arts and humanities and social [00:04:00] sciences at the moment. I’ve stepped into this role amidst our restructuring, and it’s really complicated, and I think the academic lead for enterprise, and in fact, even when the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship was founded, bringing the ‘E’ word into academia, it’s a really hard thing and often in larger universities, it would be hidden in the business school, but Goldsmiths doesn’t have a business school, didn’t teach entrepreneurship before Adrian and I arrived quite a few years ago now. I think there’s definitely that view that enterprise and universities, enterprise and the arts shouldn’t go together and those conversations I think will happen for time immemorial and they should happen because there’s a complexity.Once one becomes too much of one thing, then something is lost, of course. I’ve always somewhat naively perhaps said that rather than it being oil and water, why don’t we see it as oil and vinegar and [00:05:00] see whether we can make something tasty from it rather than it being repellent from both. But for me, with all of it, with every version of enterprise, we just see it, enterprise and entrepreneurship, we see it as creation of value and of course, some people can just see that value as being a financial value, but the way that I’ve always worked and Adrian has always worked is around aesthetic value and social value and we hope that enough money follows. That’s what we’re working with our colleagues to look at the extraordinary stuff we have at Goldsmiths and how can we offer it perhaps differently and that’s the other thing I think with entrepreneurship is being able to see things and see all of the potential impacts you could make and then you choose which ones you’re going to. It’s complex and it’s also really a way of being within academia is rarely challenged and that’s what I love about my work at Goldsmiths is that I’m working with people who have no problem challenging me all the time, [00:06:00] students and staff and it does make me think about, well, what is my role as somebody who’s passionate about making impact? What is my role in enterprise in that way? And it isn’t a very classic, and definitely the word would be used, neoliberal, but it’s not a very classic capitalist version of enterprise that we bring to it, which is perhaps a bit weird to bring that. Yeah, I’ll probably stop there, but it, what I’m definitely not doing, it’d be fun if my senior managers listen to this, what I’m definitely not doing, and I don’t think they think I would be doing this would be turning us into a multinational scalable business. I think what we’re doing is, the bits that we do is working to find different revenue streams to try and keep as many people involved in a really magical and beautiful and important way of developing the arts, humanities and social sciences and thinking that is at Goldsmiths.
Adrian De La Court: Absolutely. We agree on so [00:07:00] much, don’t we, obviously, but I think we’ve got a double edged magic wand really because we are working to develop sort of sustainable, world aware enterprises and growth but we also work with people who don’t necessarily want to develop their own enterprise. We work with people creatively and help them to understand the impact they want to make socially and support that and develop that ambition. The other aspect of the work that we do is with those, particularly students at the moment across Goldsmiths, is to actually look at their ambitions, their own personal journey and how we can best get them to make the difference that they want to make and make the impact they want to make in their future career.
Eva Keogan: That’s something that came through very strongly for me, when I was working with you, the social justice element of my work, it’s a huge passion, and I was in the right place with you. And before we go into anything else, Adrian, I wanted to get your [00:08:00] view on, when you started at Goldsmiths. What do you think has changed between that first cohort and what’s going on right now and how long has that been?
Adrian De La Court: How long has that been? I think we are going into our 16th year of the programme as it exists, so when we created the Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, which is, um, Gosh, that’s flown by. When I first joined Siân, because she was there a year before me, she actually set up the programme. When I first joined Siân and started working on the program, we only had four pathways. When we begin our next academic year, we will move into ten, because we’ve added social innovation, which is really exciting. It’s sad to see the demise of the MA in Social Entrepreneurship, but great to be able to see a way to be able to sustain that pathway and those students who are coming to us to make a difference within that strand of work within social innovation.
When we first started, I think Goldsmiths didn’t really know what to make of this, and what to do with the programme, because it’s the first programme that worked collaboratively across different departments, and there were [00:09:00] certainly people in departments who actually really understood the purpose and the drive that we had and got it, and it was easy to work with them.
But then of course, setting up the Synapse programme, we built that from scratch, because nothing like that had existed before. I spent a long time having to liaise with people in departments, meeting up with people in departments to try and explain what the programme actually was. So, you’re trying to come in and set up businesses on my anthropology programme.
I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not about that at all. It’s about working with your students to get them to really embrace the opportunities that they have while they’re students’. So that goes and taps into all the resources not just within the department, not just with the academics that they’re working, but everything across the university, the talent, the collaborations, the opportunities, and just sort of thinking about the bigger picture, not just that moment that you’re existing while you’re in a classroom in front of an academic in a lecture, but actually what that journey is and how, how you really tap [00:10:00] into the opportunities that you have. So that was quite hard work. I think we reached a point about five or six years in where the university really started to get it, departments really started to get it, and we started to settle in, sort of embed ourselves in a couple of departments. But as is always the case in, in all institutions, when, when you have rotation of people in posts, that journey starts again every year. It’s a constant, constant, working to try and filter yourself back into a space where you get the opportunity to work with the students and the staff to develop and support their ambitions and work on that impact. It’s been difficult, honestly, over the last couple of years, as you know, due to the restructuring, and we’ve lost a number of key members of staff. We’re struggling through, but I think I honestly think in times of adversity, then that’s where innovation really kicks in, and that’s where they really need the offer [00:11:00] that we have.
Eva Keogan: My next question going back to you, Siân, so you were, the first course leader? Tell me a little bit about that year, what was going on, how it all started?
Siân Prime: Yes, I was the first course leader, was the first person to be employed in the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, ICCE, it was chaotic because I’d been a guest lecturer and I’d run a module at University of Sussex, but I had never seen my career as being an academic and so there was a whole thing around learning the culture of a university but I joined the university because I’d worked with so many people who graduated and felt so lost and didn’t know how to take their talent forward. When the job came up, it felt like the right thing. I think that the really interesting thing is, it was the cultural fit that Adrian’s talked about around how do we, as people dealing with entrepreneurship, make that fit within arts, humanities and social science. I’d only ever worked in arts and humanities, so there’s a little bit of me where it’s like, [00:12:00] ‘Oh, why is this, oh, okay, it’s a question, that’s okay, don’t challenge that it’s a question, get on with it’. Our first cohort of students, I think every student that comes onto the programme that Adrian and I run are really brave because they’re coming for a very unusual course, that first set of students were really brave because we really were making it up together. I’d written a course document, but then we were working together and I think there were 13 in that first year and then suddenly nearly 30 in the second year when Adrian joined us and what I remember very much from the first two years is there were very much people like you who had been in industry or working self employed for quite some time and were recognising that, I remember the first person I interviewed to come onto the course, was a theatre producer and she just basically, it feels like the students give us a brief, and I love that. Her brief for me was, ‘If this is the only [00:13:00] way to be a theatre producer, then I’m stopping. So I’m working with you to find a different way to do this’. And then it’s really clear, you’ve got a year together to think about some of the theories of separation of self and what you do and how you protect yourself during that process, as well as the business modelling tools, techniques, and theories. But at the back of your mind, you know, right, okay, for this student, I’ve got to think about what is this new model of producer? It’s not just as it is, but bigger. It’s got to be totally different, otherwise she’s stopping. I think that was really key in the first years. I think as we’ve grown, our student cohort is so different. It’s much more international than perhaps it was initially, but also we feel like we get people who graduate and know that they need this support straight away, as well as the people who are returning to education. Or, and this is really joyful, when we [00:14:00] get people who haven’t got a first degree, and are just coming in at this level and those students that, that join us without a first degree always do so well, because they, they question everything, and also seek out everything. I think that in terms of, you know, the common thing to all of our students, and it’s probably this time of year where I say it a lot, teaching entrepreneurs is really exhausting. They’re brilliant, but they’re always looking for more, and because they’re entrepreneurs they like to test boundaries in a way that I think students do not.
Eva Keogan: One of the things I wanted to, ask you about is, , business models are constantly changing. There’s a lot going on about sustainability and you’ve just done the SELF Festival. , I wanted to ask the ways that people are making money and how they’re doing it. [00:15:00] I’m not talking about, you know, are they using SumUp or, invoicing, it’s the different business models that you’re seeing. Is there anything that, really stands out to you? You have your eyes open to new, new and exciting and innovative thinking?
Siân Prime: I see a big shift in terms of collaboration. Business models now are finding very different ways of collaborating with other people. Rather than outsourcing or trying to own the whole process, there’s many more business models where things are jointly owned, perhaps in a separate entity. I see a charity coming together, another charity, and developing a for profit business. Or I see, a specialist in one area of the arts collaborating with another artist and then working out, okay, so rather than this being a series of one off, why don’t we formalise this? So I see collaboration being treated very differently.
I think when I first joined Goldsmiths 15 years ago, [00:16:00] we felt we needed to have a separate session on digital marketing, and now it’s kind of digital payments. And now it’s just like, how on earth were we thinking that digital was separate to the way of doing it? Just everything is digital now. So I think the integrated thinking about on and offline customers and users is just absolutely embedded. Every year there’s something that’s the thing. So it might be Bitcoin, it might be blockchain, it might be, Non Fungible Tokens,
Eva Keogan: And what’s happened to them?
Siân Prime: Well, they’ve gone again. We don’t want them anymore. QR Codes took over. And it’s always that, because I can also remember sort of 18 years ago going to myself, I don’t know that QR Codes are going to be the thing. So never listen to me for business advice in some ways, but it is interesting, [00:17:00] it’s that 18 years ago, I was, everyone was a bit suspicious about this. What do you mean you scan a code and, oh, I don’t know if that’s going to be, and now that is the only way, so I think there’s something that it’s about the pace of change. Actually it isn’t about the business model but I think that is interesting and it’s also that things have to be much more integrated. You can’t think in any way about on and offline as separate and you can’t also, I think if you’re collaborating with people, there’s really interesting new business models developing from that.
Adrian De La Court: Absolutely, what we’ve seen is a shift in the number of businesses that were really focused on one specific area of practice, but now through that collaboration are developing numerous income streams. I mean, they might be short lived. And then move on to the next collaboration and next income stream. I think the really interesting thing that we, particularly from the SELF Festival, we picked up on was the way that [00:18:00] businesses are being more reflective and reactive to change, because they have to be and responding really quickly to that.
Eva Keogan: Do you think that’s the result of, the pivot, which was the big word in lockdown and there was a Deloitte paper that said ten years of innovation happened in three months. I mean, people just suddenly thought we can change this overnight.
Adrian De La Court:
It makes me come back to the very first SELF festival we had in lockdown where we ended up speaking a lot about anti-fragility, not resilience and being prepared for change, being more aware of potential threats and being responsive to that. I thought we had such fascinating conversations about being anti fragile.
Eva Keogan: I want to ask you both who we should be looking to for inspiration right now when it comes to new entrepreneurial thinking and models.
Adrian De La Court: Yeah. Tell you who I found inspiring, I found Kae Katz from Fibre Lab really inspiring. [00:19:00]
Eva Keogan: She’s amazing, honestly. I’ve been telling people about what she does, it’s just phenomenal.
Adrian De La Court: Yeah. What I learned about that journey, and it made me think about my own, and I think for a lot of creatives, maybe because of my background, maybe a lot of performance practitioners from whatever discipline, is that you, you learn your craft, but no one actually tells you how the industry operates until you actually work in the industry. She pretty much said the same. She learned her craft as a fashion designer with a huge ambition to work in the fashion industry. When she got there, had that wake up realization that nobody told her how bad an industry it was. Nobody prepared her for that. I think that’s a really interesting revelation and I really loved her journey to where she is now and what she’s doing now with that aspiration to take that sustainability and change the way that the industry works to almost franchise it out so that it’s not just an East End [00:20:00] local company, it’s actually it’s got global ambitions.
I love that ambition. That also reminds me, I found Kae Katz by attending, every year I go to the Lord Mayor’s Entrepreneurship Awards, and seeing the ambition and the talent that are coming out of those institutions, that’s inspiring and I also do a lot of work with DBACE and we also do a lot of work with Santander, but so much ambition and talent comes through those systems that sometimes don’t have the opportunity or the support to attain their ambition and growth. We lose a lot of talent, we lose a lot of ambition, because there’s not enough structure, there’s not enough infrastructure to support all of the creativity that’s coming out. I wish we could find a way to do that more, to do that better.
Siân Prime: Can I just say also with Kae Katz, and I think this is a, this speaks [00:21:00] to you and your way of working, Ade. One of the things that was extraordinary about Kae Katz was all of that, but also she was looking at how to deal with waste fabrics. She had in her head designed a machine, because there isn’t a machine that deals with it, she went from being in her head to talking to engineers and to really lead engineers to get this designed. I think what’s amazing about that is there are so many people in her sector who will say ‘That machine won’t work’. What I love about her is she’s like, ‘Well, I’m going to try it’. I think in terms of innovation that always speaks to me about, Adrian’s way of working, which is when people come up with ideas, he’s like, ‘Okay, how’s that going to work?’. Rather than, ‘That can’t work, or how can you forward it?’. He’s just straight into, ‘Right, let’s get into how does that massive vision work?’. AI think those kinds of people are so inspiring in terms of, [00:22:00] it’s not just seeing a gap in the market, it’s seeing a whole gap in the infrastructure, and that they’re just going to solve it.
Eva Keogan: And I think the fashion industry is showing up with some really interesting, new business models and trying to make itself more sustainable, but it’s got a long way to go, hasn’t it? It’s a tricky one to be in and of course, that’s the other thing, when you’re an entrepreneur, you want everything to be perfect. You know, it’s got to have, social purpose but we’re talking about the warts in all worlds, aren’t we? Nothing is perfect. And we’re in pretty, pretty dire times. Going back into the positive, Siân, who is your inspiration from the entrepreneurship sector?
Siân Prime: I’ve got too many. There’s a person in Kenya, George Gachara, and he’s extraordinary. He’s a creative industries investor, and he started by just saving his own money and then investing in creative businesses. He didn’t start in any lofty way. He’s just a very standard person who knew the creative industries in his country needed finance and he [00:23:00] decided to be part of that solution. He’s one of the most thoughtful investors, producers, Yeah, he’s just so thoughtful and I think there’s something very interesting again in the work and the people that I’ve met in East Africa, South Africa and West Africa. They’re jumping ahead of us in a way, because they’re looking at all the mistakes that we’ve made, particularly in fashion, but also in film and film distribution and they don’t have our history of top down management, of terrible practice in terms of the way that you treat people that you’re employing, and they’re just like, ‘Okay, so if I want to create a business that isn’t going to harm the environment, it’s going to use natural products locally, and employ people in a way that means that they can live their life and live their life well, what does the business look like?’. So, that’s where we are. That starting place is really exciting. I was really inspired by one of our alumni, and she was an [00:24:00] alumni from the second year of the program, to come and speak recently. I was really struck by how she’s not only an incredible user experience designer, but she has a piece of her life as a volunteer, which is she is a death jeweller. She works to support people to manage the end of their life. What was inspiring, not only is that an amazing thing to do, but she’s really brought that thoughtfulness about the end of an experience or the end of a product or the end of a business into the way that she works. Being able to think into the end of something as much as the beginning is really important in terms of entrepreneurship and business modelling. I found that really thoughtfully and oddly inspiring. There’s an organisation called Zinc and they work to create different forms of social impact, social investment. They work particularly with academics and universities to really look at the research that’s coming out from universities and how can that be used [00:25:00] for social entrepreneurship, so not just straightforward commercialisation and they work really well in terms of the teams that they bring together to manage that. So, I find those three are probably the ones that keep me going.
Eva Keogan: Brilliant. Just before we finish up, I wanted to ask you both what your advice for today’s aspirational entrepreneurs is.
Adrian De La Court: Nice, what would my advice be? I would say they’ve got to be socially and politically aware of all the changes and challenges that are every second pivoting and changing and be responsive to that. I had a really interesting day yesterday where I met with all of the entrepreneurs that were in our incubator challenges that they’re facing. You know, just sometimes, and we say this, sometimes, just acknowledging that it’s hard because it’s hard and have that ability and anti-fragility to just keep pushing forward and working at it. Keep going. Keep going.
Eva Keogan: Brilliant. Thank you, Adrian and Siân.
Siân Prime: [00:26:00] Don’t stop talking, which I think is the answer Adrian’s giving as well, is it is hard, so talk about how hard it is and somebody might have an answer in your network that you don’t know. Don’t keep that to yourself and the other advice I would give is it is really hard, but it’s not that hard. Starting a business is easy. Keeping it going is hard. I think I suppose that point you made about the pivot is, if it starts not working, change it. Everybody’s going be excited at the change you’re going make. Nobody’s going say, ‘Oh, but hold on, when you wrote the business plan, you said you were going do this’. That doesn’t matter. Do what you need to do within it. I think that kind of really listening as well as speaking to people is the key part of it, I think is the best advice I could do.
Eva Keogan: And that’s the whole reason that this podcast exists is to keep the conversation going about entrepreneurship. And it’s been incredibly enlightening to hear both of you and lovely to see you both again after a while. Thank you very much, for joining me today. And hopefully we’ll have you back on again soon.
Adrian De La Court: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Siân Prime
Adrian De La Court
Goldsmiths ICCE
SELF Festival
Santander Awards
https://dbace.org/
Zinc
Lord Mayor’s Entrepreneurship Awards
