Reflecting on how artists-entrepreneurs make sense of the complexity of their double role

While artists are invoked as inspirational agents to renovate our managerial thinking, they also struggle with our rules when they act as economic agents to sustain their projects. The paper analyzes longitudinally a case study of an artist working also as an entrepreneur, and focusing on the ambiguity affecting the multiple roles played by the artist during the attempt to sustain her artistic vein in the entrepreneurial venture. Through the analysis of the longitudinal sequence of stages where creative and artistic imagination originate entrepreneurial ideas, the paper makes sense of the emerging ambiguity affecting the process though which each choice is built as part of an (un)coherent pattern. As an individual artist, as an entrepreneur, and a social actor, she does play multiple and conflicting roles. In what follows, the paper thus makes sense of the case to understand how the multifaceted dimension of artistic and creative roles clash sometimes with the managerial and entrepreneurial practices and what we can learn from this “failure”.