PhD candidate Benedetta D'Ettorre awarded with "Best Paper in Creative Industries"

PhD candidate Benedetta d’Ettorre was awarded with “Best Paper in Creative Industries Entrepreneurship” at the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) Conference in October.

The 2021 Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) Conference was held at Cardiff City Hall. The title and theme this year was “Bridging Enterprise, Policy And Practice: Creating Social And Public Value”. The conference brings together researchers, businesses, entrepreneurs and policymakers through the plenary and parallel sessions to share and discuss current research on small businesses, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Benedetta d’Ettorre is a final year PhD student at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds. Through the Cultural Institute at the University of Leeds, Benedetta was awarded a collaborative doctoral scholarship in partnership with East Street Arts to research the sustainability and resilience of artists’ organisations in the context of their Guild programme.

At the IBSE Conference, Benedetta presented her paper “Reframing Sustainability in Small Artist-Led Organisations: Bridging Policy and Practice”, discussing how the “sustainability” of artists’ organisations is currently framed in cultural policy and resort to a multi-disciplinary approach (business and organisational studies, entrepreneurship, cultural entrepreneurship, artist-led initiatives and organisations) to critically engage with it.

It was great to be able to discuss my research at the conference and with a wider public. Winning the “Best paper in Creative Industries Entrepreneurship” award is a great achievement and I think it is an acknowledgement of the originality of my work and the impact it can have.

Learning from the experiences of artists, and reviewing current research in cultural policy and business studies, she argued that a re-framing of how we think about “sustainability” is needed in the context of small-artist led organisations to actually make them sustainable. In turn, this has the potential to bridge between policy and practice and to influence both cultural policy and the practices of artists.

You can read the full article and find out more about Benedetta and her collaborative PhD research project on the East Street Arts website.