This study aims to understand the role of the creative entrepreneur in the development of his business.
For the development of this study, primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews with five creative entrepreneurs in the Douro region. To triangulate the information, interviews were also carried out with four heads of local institutions, namely, a university, two municipalities and a business incubator.
The results obtained suggest that creative entrepreneurs play an important role in the development of their business, since creativity and innovation are fundamental for the sustainability of their business. However, the results suggest that the main difficulties experienced by this type of entrepreneurs are related to poor knowledge and interest in management. As a rule, poor management knowledge leads to the emergence of several obstacles, related to sales, stocks, production costs and bureaucracy.
This study contributes to the existing literature by providing new insights into the main difficulties of creative entrepreneurs, how they overcome these obstacles.
The results obtained provide important information for policymakers. The creation of management training programs and cooperation incentives can be important for the growth and development of this type of company. In addition, it shows that it is necessary to create specific policies to encourage and support creative entrepreneurs, since they have different specifications than most entrepreneurs.
This study provides empirical evidence on the ability to explore the intersection between individual entrepreneur creativity and business success. Furthermore, this study demonstrates: i) how your creative entrepreneur management knowledge affects your business; ii) the main difficulties of this type of entrepreneurs; iii) how they have overcome these difficulties; iv) how creative entrepreneurs cooperate with each other.
