How can you use your creative practice in entrepreneurial ways to ensure you always have a sustainable career? How can you gain the skills to see when and how your creative practice can scale up to embrace new opportunities as they arise?
In this unit students extend their creative thinking into the business of reaching audiences, communities, government and funding agencies and commercial enterprises with their creative work and projects. The unit starts with the financial fundamentals of work as a sole trader compared to work as an employee; what's involved in managing income, taxes, invoicing; and what's involved if you want to establish your own company. Students are also introduced to simple budgeting processes to track their own expenditure and to manage creative projects.
A key component of the unit focuses on rights; what they entail and how to manage your rights as a creative practitioner (copyright, intellectual property) and how to respect the rights of others. Through sample scenarios, students discover the nuances of legal agreements and contracts that they may be asked to sign or that they may ask others to sign.
Students develop entrepreneurial skills through project-based learning involving how to develop concepts for creative projects, how to maximise ways to reach an audience on a project, how to communicate the concept to others, how to attract collaborators and partners, how to budget a project and how to attract investors in the project.
Students will choose a real-world project and develop the concept, budget and project plan to pitch to potential investors (such as a government agency that provides arts funding), taking into consideration any ethical or safety issues. This unit prepares students to develop and manage their own professional work as a creative practitioner in any creative discipline.
