Designing Craft Opportunity: An Entrepreneurial Approach To Creating The Craft Scotland Summer Show

Building appropriate support and opportunity in the creative industries can be a challenging task. Understanding that the shifting contexts of the creative industries, specifically the craft sector, make the development of a programme of support difficult for national organisations, this paper suggests that the application of entrepreneurial design is a theory well suited to the task. Drawing on six years of iteration of an annual commercial craft exhibition, the paper presents an early case study that aligns development of the Craft Scotland Summer Show with models of entrepreneurial design, highlighting the processes that are shared, and the areas that may potentially be improved. Doing so begins to lay the foundation for greater analysis and evaluation of the interactions between an organisation and the community it serves, with an eventual goal of understanding how this relationship impacts upon the Scottish makers.