By Giovanni Schiuma

The arts in business have been considered, at best, as something nice to have or to support for social-cultural reasons and that they have nothing to offer from a management standpoint. The Value of Arts for Business challenges this view by showing how the arts, in the form of Arts-based Initiatives (ABIs), can be used to enhance value-creation capacity and boost business performance.

The Value of Arts for Business proposes the arts as a new ‘territory’ to innovate management systems and the Arts-Based Initiatives (ABIs) are analysed as managerial instruments to manage the organisation’s aesthetic dimensions with a positive impact on the development of organisational people and infrastructure. In this scholarly book the author systematically elucidates the benefits that organisations can achieve by absorbing the arts in their working mechanisms and management systems.

In this book, I discuss how the arts can enhance organisational value capacity, addressing the following fundamental issues: What is the value of arts in business? What is the role of the arts in management? How can the arts contribute to improve business performance? Why do organisations need to absorb the arts in their working mechanisms and business models?

The importance of clarifying how the arts can contribute to the development of organisations appears particularly crucial in today’s complex and knowledge-based business age. As organisations are searching for new solutions to engage and improve the working life of their people, face difficult management challenges, generate experience-based market value and spur resilience and innovativeness, the arts can sustain organisations to find new possible solutions to the emergent business problems.

Today, with so many business problems that are radically changing the economic and competitive scenario, it is critical for organisations to identify new knowledge to inspire management innovations. In this logic The Value of Arts for Business proposes the arts as a possible ‘revolution’ in innovating management practices, providing tools to manage organisational aesthetic experiences and properties.

It proposes three main models that show how organisations can successfully implement and manage ABIs to impact on business performance. Firstly, the Arts Value Matrix enables managers to see how organisational value-drivers are affected by ABIs. Secondly, the Arts Benefits Constellation shows how to assess the benefits of using ABIs. Finally, the Arts Value Map shows how ABIs can be integrated and aligned with organisational strategy and operations.

This book makes theoretical and practical contributions. From theory viewpoint it lays the foundations for a new research area exploring the links between arts and business. While, from practical point of view it helps managers and arts-based organisations to better design, implement and assess ABIs that are fully incorporated into management systems and drive value creation dynamics.

About the author

Professor Giovanni Schiuma Giovanni is a leading international expert of Arts in Business. Giovanni is Chairman of the Arts for Business Institute. Recently established, the Institute is a private and independent nonprofit organization committed to develop insightful research and to deliver inspiring and fruitful education services on the use of the arts in business. The Arts for Business Institute supports and advises individuals and organizations on the use of arts in business, as well as it acts through engaging policy makers and key influencers in government and the management profession. The Institute fosters the following activities: Leading-edge research projects; Executive education for learning and people development; Applied projects for organizational development; Evaluation services, Events.

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