Art and Business. How artistic interventions within organizations foster innovation.

Abstract

Organizations, in order to gain competitive advantage in the market, are forced to be innovative. As many researches emphasize, innovation is strictly correlated with creativity. For these reasons, introducing a creative individual within the organization’s context can enhance the company’s innovation capacity. The artist’s creativity is an important source for businesses that aim at generate innovation in their sector. Moreover, the artist’s point of view is distant from the managerial one. These two worlds have different approaches to perform tasks, different goals and in some cases they even speak different “languages”. However, they also have a lot of in common. The encounter of the world of business and the world of art can create benefits for all the stakeholders involved. However, it is not always easy for the two parts to overcome this challenge by their own. In addition, the people involved in the project can feel exposed to risks because the result of artistic interventions is uncertain. For these reasons an intermediary figure exists, which manages the dialogues, sets the rules and monitors the collaboration between artists and organizations. This is the art and business broker who works as a bridge between the two worlds that sometimes seem to be distant or even incompatible. I will investigate the role of art and business broker of artistic interventions within organizations by analysing three cases of collaboration between artists and organizations. The art and business partnerships are involved in the research project “Artificare/Art&Business” developed by Ca’Foscari University and IUAV and supported by Veneto region. The main aim is studying the processes of collaboration between art and business, researching how these relationships start, develop and cease, and which consequences they bring at the end of the partnership.