Career trajectories, challenges and skills development of creative entrepreneurs in a World Heritage Site

The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in Penang, Malaysia have grown substantially since the inscription of George Town as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) in 2008. The community of Penang-based artists and creative workers produce outputs in diverse forms including visual and performing arts, music, traditional crafts, design and film/TV/videogames. The research focuses on those creative workers who have established their own businesses. However, it is not always straightforward to distinguish creative entrepreneurs from other creative workers due to the precarious, portfolio-based and casualised nature of labour in creative careers (McRobbie, 2018). Individuals in the creative industries construct their identity as artists, artisans/craftsmen, freelancers and entrepreneurs who engage in different forms of work, including non-creative work, to generate income. Creative actors who may not self-identify primarily as entrepreneurs still engage in entrepreneurial behaviours to access the resources and skills required to sustain their business (de Klerk, 2015). Creative entrepreneurs draw on the unique multicultural heritage of Penang by interpreting local traditions in new ways as they develop their own entrepreneurial ventures. Such heritage-based entrepreneurship follows on the conceptualisation of cultural heritage as a resource for economic development, job creation and business opportunities (Chen et al., 2021). Specifically, entrepreneurial ventures that revitalise local crafts are driven by a consumer desire to escape the pressures of modernisation and urbanisation (ibid.). However, the revitalisation of traditional crafts such as batik also involves adaptation to contemporary design trends (Poon, 2017). Besides craft entrepreneurs who draw more on traditional skills other creative entrepreneurs focus more on the applications of technology to the creative industries: the Penang State Government is developing the CD2@George Town creative digital district, which is meant to foster interactions between the creative and digital sectors. Besides the precarious nature of labour, it is argued that entrepreneurs in CCIs face unique challenges compared to those faced by "traditional entrepreneurs (Näsholm and Eriksson, 2025; Madgerova and Kyurova, 2019). Cultural (arts) entrepreneurs need to constantly innovate as value creation in their businesses results from unique expression which is not scalable (Strøm et al., 2020). Creative entrepreneurs also face challenges relating to skills gaps as the portfolio nature of creative careers means that they need to develop entrepreneurial skills to promote their work besides skills in their area of creative practice. A scoping review on the skills gaps of graduates for the creative industries distinguishes between hard and soft skills gaps: digital, marketing and data analysis skills were identified as the more prominent hard skills, while communication and collaboration were noted as the most relevant soft skills (Dooley et al., 2024). Concerns about these skills gap have influenced arts education: for example, arts schools have been adding entrepreneurship modules in their curriculum to help arts graduates sell their work in an environment of decreasing public support for the arts (Chang and Wyszomirski, 2015). Entrepreneurship education in the arts has been a controversial topic as entrepreneurship is associated with the profit motive which may contradict the intrinsic motivations of artists and creatives: although such entrepreneurship in arts education may no longer be a "dirty word", it would not be advisable to copy entrepreneurship curricula from business schools as arts graduate will work in a different context (Bridgstock, 2012). In more applied fields such as fashion design (Lang and Liu, 2019) entrepreneurial skills are less controversial. The development of entrepreneurial, or more broadly, commercial skills would require a different path for those creative workers who do not follow the formal education route but may have turned an amateur hobby into a creative career. Specifically, women may enter creative employment in a more improvised manner by turning a crafts skill or creative hobby into a source of income, but the often romanticised narrative of such creative ventures obscures how rare such career transitions are (Luckman and Andrew, 2018).