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Given the dramatic changes taking place in society, the economy, and technology, 21st-century organizations need to engage in new, more spontaneous, and more innovative ways of managing. I investigate why an increasing number of companies are including artists and artistic processes in their approaches to strategic and day-to-day management and leadership.

We live in the Age of Knowledge, which is impelling us towards the Age of Imagination. The technological wave rises and with it rises a wave of change that will affect both the economy and society. When these two waves will reach the coast where knowledge meets ignorance, and how to ride them, are questions that require us to imagine the future. We must, therefore, embark on the vessel of imagination, leaving behind us the baggage of what we know and understand. Imagination is not just the springboard for ideas; it also acts to connect ideas in different ways that may blossom in the garden of an entrepreneurial renaissance. Symbols, metaphors and concepts that belong to our tacit knowledge come to light in our memory. It is from here that the imagination draws its lifeblood, broadening our horizons, inducing us to interact with others who may be the bearers of other cultures. Are we ready to engage in an imaginative learning process to join business with innovation and art? Are we prepared to design a wide-open white space where the actors of entrepreneurship, innovation and art can generate a constructive tension that will sweep away what appears to be mutual antagonism or incompatibility?

While audiences play a key role in the implementation and ultimate success of novel ideas, how audiences are reflected in negotiations about quality within the creative process remains undertheorized. We examine this question through a comparative ethnography of two settings where digital technology use magnifies the countless micro-decisions involved in producing a creative output and considerations of audience evaluation throughout the creative process – Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research. We find that actors encounter a fundamental tension between two competing standards of quality: the technically perfect, processed and ideal versus the empirically grounded, unprocessed and real. We show how actors navigate this tension vis-á-vis three different audiences – internal peers, extended community, and external reviewers – and how this manifests differently across audiences and the arts and sciences, depending on the audience’s expertise. Our study illuminates the tension between the “ideal versus real” in creative processes that is brought to the fore when creating with digital technology, extends extant research on audiences and organizing for creativity, and offers unique insights from our comparative ethnography across the arts and sciences.

The competitive luxury market raises higher requirements for luxury brands to effectively involve young generations in creating and endowing meanings to products, services and experiences. Several researchers suggest that art experiences create a fertile source of co-creation practices for cultural customers as they could engage in cognitive, emotional and imaginal activities to endowing meanings to products or services. Hence, bridging art and luxury is of significance for luxury brands to create value and engage their customers. This chapter delivers the essence of value for luxury brands and their customers and focusses on how luxury brands deploy art-based initiatives as a favourable technique in which value co-creation takes place.

This chapter examines the potential of ‘Artivism’ for activist criminology. Drawing on a body of work developed since 2016, this chapter explores a series of projects that have examined how an approach to research that harnesses the activist qualities of art could be used to inform transformative criminological research. Artivism is an approach that involves merging ‘the boundless imagination of art and the radical engagement of politics’ (Jordan, 2020, p. 60), and by amplifying marginalised voices, the overarching aim is to effect social and political change. This type of activist art is not reducible to the production of political art – art about an issue – but instead seeks to change the way that we think, speak, and act. In this sense, this approach accords with the principles of critical social research in ensuring that ‘the voices and experiences of those marginalised by institutionalised state practices are heard and represented’ (Scraton, 2007, p. 10). Examining pilot projects developed with artists and producers based in Liverpool, England, and focussed on experiences of prison and probation, the authors examine the potential that this approach has to change both the way they work as critical criminologists and the objects of this study. With reference to the question of a method for activist criminology, the chapter suggests that critical criminological work can be informed and enhanced by collaboration with socially engaged art – a form of artistic practice that seeks to address social and political issues and is often associated with activist strategies. This chapter, therefore, aims to contribute to debates about how activist criminologies may be done and offers suggestions for new directions in this work underpinned by interdisciplinary collaborations and the coproduction of research with those similarly committed to a transformative project.