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The inventor of the first personal computer in the world advocates a conceptual shift in the way companies will have to nurture customers and seek innovations in products or services that were designed to satisfy yet to be defined needs.

In The Great Derangement, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh examines the present inability to understand and represent the scale and violence of the environmental crisis. The book is a passionate awakening call for collective action to drive change, with Ghosh clearly identifying the limits of the present framework of values, which inhibits politicians, industrialists and economists from moving towards a truly sustainable civilization. In the Anthropocene, non-human and post-human factors are raising questions about the concept of a silent Nature that can be domesticated for human advantage and the perspective of continuous progress – both of which have dominated the modern age. Nevertheless, the detailed scientific analysis of the violation of the planet’s limited capacities continues to be refuted, triggering irrational, short-term utilitarian behaviours which are preventing the fundamental changes required for the transition to sustainable development. Artists, philosophers and writers can play an invaluable role in reframing our ways of thinking, filling the gap between scientific knowledge and emotional perception. Pioneering artistic experiments are appearing all over the world, from both well-established and emerging artists, and through collective processes, and this cultural movement is setting the scene for a new wave of eco-entrepreneurs driven by the altruistic mission of saving the planet. As has happened in many previous crises, it is again in the hands of artists to redefine how we perceive ourselves and so to support the emergence of new ideas, new learning, and finally to shape society and the economy around a renewed sense of the future for humankind on Earth.

An inexorable pursuit of economic gain has ushered in fashionable, entrepreneurial manoeuvres in the arts. This has led not only to the acceptance of new sectoral categories, such as the creative industries, but also to a form of creative industrialization that encourages additive injections of market logic and notions of entrepreneurial value to an erstwhile dependent culture of the arts. Normative silo-based analyses continue unabated in the gnostic worlds of both the arts and entrepreneurship, with a tendency for the latter to ‘rescue’ the ‘failing’ arts. Application of market logic can, however, ignore the multivalence of entrepreneurship or the rich textures of meaning provided by the arts. It is suggested that a consideration of the centrality of imagination offers insights into different forms of value creation in entrepreneurship and of the creative entrepreneurial dimensions in the arts. A review is presented of how entrepreneurship has positioned itself in the arts and questions are raised about the constraints of a market logic approach. It is argued that such an approach promotes a deficit model of the arts and a stagnant, status quo understanding of entrepreneurship. By exploring various arts movements, such as the Bauhaus project, the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s philosophy and the unique, needs-focussed work of the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, creative latitude can be found in the meaning of entrepreneurship as the mobilization of the resources of imagination.