Interrogating the NAGRENTs

Before I start blogging about some of the early results from my research I will write a bit more about the data-gathering process.

How do I go about collecting data from my 7 creative sector NAGRENTs (Nascent Graduate Entrepreneurs)?

Criteria for Choice

I could, of course, justify my choices by an in-depth critique based on ontological, epistemological , and methodological criteria – as I will no doubt have to in my thesis.

However, pragmatically the choice was based on several rather more personal criteria.

•   I am doing this PhD for fun (sic) so wanted a data-gathering process I would enjoy.
•   I wanted the participants to stick with me for 3-4 years, so I needed a process they would enjoy.
• Crucially, I needed to gain the trust of the participants, but not intrude too much in their world, or influence their business too much.
• In case any of us re-located during the research, I needed a process which was geographically robust.
• And, of course, it had to be methodologically sound enough for my thesis.

Core interviews
The core approach that met these criteria was infrequent, in-depth, semi-structured interviews, supplemented by other materials.  

• 6-monthly interviews (to minimise intrusion and influence).
• 2.5 hrs long (to achieve depth)
• Semi-structured (to give enable the participant to share control of the agenda and enjoy the discussion, but also to ensure that I covered the areas of interest fully)
• Some formal questionnaires (eg GET test, Learning Styles, Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy) as the participants enjoy them and they provide topics for discussion.
• Repetitive, longitudinally, so I can observe and understand changes in their business, their art, their personal lives.

Supplementary material
The supplementary materials include their products/services, business plans, Tweets, Facebook pages etc. These are not core material, but serve to corroborate the interviews, and also generate topics to explore.

Has it worked?

All the criteria have been achieved in that I am enjoying it, the participants have all signed up very willingly to end-2013, and I am collecting a wealth of frank and relevant material.

I am just hoping that I will be able to make sense of it all over the next 3 years as I focus on analysis, conclusions, and thesis.

In the next couple of blogs I will write about the interviews, the formal questionnaires, and the way that I am transcribing and organising the avalanche of words I am collecting.

Tell 'em, Tell 'em, Tell 'em - Reflections on Artistic Presentations

On Monday I attended the 'Show & Tell' at the end of a course for 'creatives' in Middlesbrough, run by CIDA. (Thanks, Anamaria for inviting me!).

The presentations were full of really interesting creative stuff that the participants were doing but some of them lacked the impact they deserved because they were not well structured. For me, the beginning and end of a presentation are crucial - the first to grab attention, the last to summarise and make the 'call for action'. 

My thoughts about 5 key 'Tell 'ems'..........
 
Tell 'em who you are (slowly and clearly, preferably with your name on the screen)
"Hi everyone, my name is Richard Hanage and I run a business called Richard Hanage Associates.
I provide business start-up training and support, mainly in the University sector. More importantly, for this presentation, I am doing a PhD researching creative graduates starting creative sector businesses".

Tell 'em why they should listen to you...(grab their attention)
"You probably know that many start-ups fail to get off the ground. In the creative sector the success rate is even worse - because its a really tough sector to get into.
I would like to share my thoughts on how can we help more young graduates succeed".

Tell 'em the main presentation.
(I could write a book on this bit... bit I won't. It's well covered ground)

Tell 'em what you have just told them....(preferably 3 things)
"In summary, then, I think there are 3 key things we can try to do...
 - build their confidence to speak proudly and passionately about their 'art'
 - help them with the nuts and bolts of running a business
 - train them to make really good presentations and sales pitches."

Tell 'em what to do next (the call to action, preferably with contact info on the screen)
"I hope you have found that useful.  If you would like to hear more please contact me after this presentation or by e-mail. Here is my business card, and you can follow me on Twitter at @rhanage".


.... and a call to action!
I suspect that if a presentation has a really good start and finish it doesn't matter so much if the audience don't take in all the middle bit. So I beleive that when we are giving presentation training we should help our participants to concentrate on these parts as well as the main body.

David Rae's Triadic Model of Entrepreneurial Learning

Summaries of Influential Papers
In this post I refer describe an academic paper which has influenced my thinking. More will follow over the next few months.

Rea (2004) Entrepreneurial Learning – a Practical Model from the Creative Industries

Rae, D. (2004). Entrepreneurial Learning: a Practical Model from the Creative Industries. Education and Training, 46(8-9), 492-500.

###  Click her for a 2-page summary of the paper  ###


The paper proposes a triadic model consistes of 3 main themes and 11 sub-themes

· Personal and social emergence of entrepreneurial identity. Their identity expresses their sense of self and future aspirations, and how they want to be recognised by others. They re-negotiate their personal/social identities, influenced by early life and by current experiences.

· Opportunity recognition arising from contextual learning. Share/compare their experiences with others and intuitively learn to recognise opportunities, to find out who they can become, who they can work with, and what they can/cannot achieve.

· The negotiated enterprise. Ideas and aspirations are not achieved alone, but by negotiated interpersonal relationships and exchange with others inside and outside the business.

Implications for my PhD

I discovered this paper early in my PhD reading and found it extremely useful. Much of the content chimed well with my experience as a practitioner and as a teacher/mentor. The triadic model was the first I had found to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework applicable to the creative sector. Since then I have been surprised to find nothing else like it, though some papers explore other aspects of the development of creative businesses.

 Equally I have been disappointed to see that it has not been cited as much as it appears to deserve. Is this a reflection on the model or on the paucity of researchers in the area?


My participants comprise seven creative entrepreneurs in the process of emerging – and I am following their journey in real time. Many aspects of the model seem applicable, and I will be exploring how well it applies to them, and what new factors need to be added. They will test and broaden the model as their journeys may include business failure, and/or shift to employment, as well as business success.


Already it is clear that personal factors will play a large part in their outcomes as they go through the daunting/exciting transition from student to being a ‘grown up’ with a business, a career and even a family in some cases. These factors need to be more explicit in any new model covering young creative NAGRENTS.
 
My next three blogs will explore the three themes - in relation to my research participants

‘Great Expectations’ – a performance in 3 acts

Setting

Early 21^st Century – in the creative sector.

 

Cast of characters

Seven creative NAGRENTs (nascent graduate entrepreneurs) who are trying to start a business soon after graduating.

 

What are the three acts?

·         Act 1: Retrospective. The first act is a retrospective of their life before graduation, in which they have developed skills, experience and attitudes that may help them in their business quest.

·         Act 2: Zig-zag. The second act is their first year or two in business, in which they explore options and find out whether they are entrepreneurial enough to succeed.

·         Act 3. A career? In the third act they try to use their learning from the previous acts to establish themselves in a career – business, employment, or whatever – as their personal life matures and the need to make a living becomes a priority.

Who are they?

·         There are 5 males and 2 females; 5 whites and 2 non-whites.

·         They are from various parts of England, and were all born and mainly educated in England.

·         All attended University in the North-East

·         They all did creative first degrees and 3 followed on with creative masters degrees.

·         They were all 26 or under at the start of the research.

What business experience do they have?

·         5 have had some employment experience, but not all in the creative sector.

·         None have tried to start a business before.

·         2 have parents in business.

·         1 has a sibling in business.

Do they have the potential to succeed?

·         2 had attended my ‘Enterprise’ workshop series at Teesside University, and the others were on my start-up workshops as part of their DigitalCity Fellowship. This is how I found them and it was the indication of their commitment to business start-up that I needed in order to take them on.

·         All have been identified as ‘having potential’ and/or were committed to setting up a growth business. No ‘starving artists’, at least not by intention.

When does the performance start?

It has already been under way for 2 years. Nobody has reached the third act yet, but 2 of them are approaching it. In future blogs I will write about snippets of their performances.

Next week’s blog
Next week I will talk about one of the papers that originally inspired my PhD subject:  David Rae (2004) Entrepreneurial Learning: a Practical Model from the Creative Industries.

Quantitative or Qualitative?

Policy is driven by facts!

A few years ago I attended a methodology session at an academic conference. A civil servant from the Department of Business or Education, I can't remember which, or even what it was called at that time, stood up at the and said they were only interested in quantitative research.  Policy had to be driven by verified facts and qualitative research did not provide that.  I was slightly surprised that he was suggesting that policy is actually driven by any observable facts, but made a note that if I did some research and aspired to have influence it would have to be quantitative.

Looming disillusionment with the quantitative approach

At the time I was starting my part-time Ph.D. looking at entrepreneurial graduates and did aspire to make an impact on either policy or practice, and as a scientist by training the quantitative approach was more natural to me.  However I already read many learned papers from the Journal of Business Venturing, and other highly regarded journals, and had become disillusioned by the approach that most of them take.  Some otherwise excellent papers on nascent entrepreneurs using data from a large US database (PSED) look impressive but their conclusions were undermined by the very broad range of nascent entrepreneurs in the samples. One critical author remarked that they might as well be researching holiday-makers, both are highly diverse and transient groups.

Out with factual quantitative; in with insightful qualitative

However, I did consider using a quantitative approach myself and found a very similar problem.  Looking at about 100 creative entrepreneurs who had gone through the DigitalCity Fellowship they varied enormously in their backgrounds, their ideas, their motivations, and their attitudes to business start-up.  Even if I worked with all of them it was clear that the sample would totally inadequate to tease out the many and various issues that I could already observe.

So, with the encouragement of my tutors, I opted for a qualitative approach in which I would look in great depth at a small number of participants, using very tight selection criteria. 

The lucky sample of seven

A previous blog has described how the selection criteria help me identify young, business naive, creative graduates starting a business immediately on graduation.  In the end I found eight suitable participants. Happily only one of these turned me down.  Eight would have been a nice round number, but seven is said to be a lucky number… and I perhaps I will need luck more than I need roundness.

Will I be ever be influential (before I'm 99)?

Will I ever influence policy or practice?  It is clear that I won’t influence policymakers directly, but hopefully I can prepare both academic and practitioner papers from my research which may have an effect on those who support creative NAGRENTs in their difficult task. My tutors tell me that the purpose of my research is to gain insights that may in themselves have some influence, or may lead on to further research to verify more explicitly some of the findings.  It sounds as if I might have many years of postdoctoral research ahead of me!

Next blogs………….

The next blog will describe briefly the seven participants and show how even with the tight selection criteria I have seven very interesting and varied cases to study.  After that I am going to start blogging about some of the academic papers that have influenced my thinking and my approach.

How did I select the creative NAGRENTs?

Policy-makers have a strong (but perhaps mistaken?) confidence in the economic benefits of graduates, of business start-ups, and the creative sector. Happily, my personal curiosity about creative NAGRENTs hits all three categories, so hopefully the research will be of interest.

A Retrospective study?

It could be interesting, as may people have already done, to investigate retrospectively the start-ups of successful graduates, but that prevents us from learning about the probably much larger number who don't make the grade.

Another approach would be to seek out those who have not succeeded and investigate them. Quite apart from the tricky question of constitutes success or failure, it could be hard to find such graduates. I am also sceptical anyway (as are many authors) about the value of retrospective investigations. Post-rationalisation is a wonderful thing!

A real-time study of NAGRENTS..  with potential, but steep learning curves

As I am doing a part-time PhD (of up to 7 years!) I decided to do a 'real-time' investigation over 4 years of a selection of creative NAGRENTs who had the potential, and stated intent, to grow a successful business. No starving artists! I would follow them, whatever the outcomes, in order to find out how they coped with the stresses and strains of start-up and the development of their career.

The final important decision was to only include graduates with NO prior start-up experience and fresh from graduation. The reason for this was to  ensure that they would have a steep learning curves to climb - which has already proved to be the case.

Selection criteria

The criteria for selection were:

• Studied a creative subject degree, in the UK
• Starting a UK business in the creative sector, on graduation. 
• Stated intent to succeed and grow.
• No prior start-up experience, and limited employment experience.
• Demonstrated commitment by attending start-up training/support.

and, of course, prepared to be researched in depth for four years!

So,  I was assembling a cohort of young inexperienced creative graduates who were committed to trying to start a business in one of the most competitive sectors in the UK. Could be interesting!

In the next blog I will talk about the big decision - a qualitative or quantitative study?

Creative NAGRENTS - Why Do They Interest Me?

I said in the last blog that I would talk about how I chose the creative NAGRENTs that I am following. However, I think that first it would be better for me to explain how I got into this in the first place.

Where it Started

It all started about 5 years ago, when I first got involved with running start-up workshops for DigitalCity Fellows at Teesside University. I remember asking some of the DigitalCity staff how on earth these graduates could possibly make a living out of their creative degrees. I didn't get a good answer, perhaps because they knew, as I do now, that it is a very difficult thing to do.

The Fellows I observed then were ducking and diving to try and scratch together some income. Starving digital artists - creative, technical, passionate, well-supported, but penniless!

The Zig-zag Route to Success

We know that it is normal for start-ups to zig and zag initially. We all did it at some stage. I have been emphasising this for years, using the diagram below, and more recently it has been featured by Mullins and Kosimar in their 2009 book 'Getting to Plan B' (or even 'Plan G', in the case of PayPal)

However it seemed to me that the Fellows' business plans were much more based on hope than reality compared with typical ones for other sectors. Could they implement the plans and if not, how did they cope with the personal,artistic and business shifts they would have to make?

The research objective

The objective of my research is therefore to find out what happens to a small selection of creative NAGRENTs as they struggle to make there way in the sector. Its a longitudinal study so I can observe their development over the first four years of their business - and even that might not be enough to see them reach any degree of business/career stability.

Now that the purpose is clear, I will describe the sample selection process next week. I promise!