Fall 2025 / 6 Units

4.S24 Creative careers: strategy, models, crossovers

Fall 2025 / 6 Units

Creative careers: strategy, models, crossovers equips students in design, arts, and culture to transform their practice into sustainable professional pathways. Through lectures and labs, participants engage with cultural management, international frameworks, and entrepreneurial tools while experimenting in crossovers where creative practice generates new forms of value for society and industry. The course combines a value-based reading of cultural production with practical methods, preparing students to position their work in professional and market contexts with positive human impact.

This course is taught in a lecture and lab format and is intended for students with an interest in cultural and creative practice. Students engage with cultural economics and management, international cultural policy frameworks, and entrepreneurial tools, including business models, market positioning, branding, and intellectual property protection. Structured exercises guide them in understanding these tools and applying them directly to their own practice. In lab sessions, students explore crossovers as opportunities to test how their creative practice can generate value and contribute to innovation in other fields of society and industry, developing experimental propositions for real-world applications.

Students are invited, though not required, to begin the course with an initial sense of the professional output they would like to pursue (e.g., design, visual art, music, performance, cultural strategies, or consulting). Such an orientation can facilitate the application of the frameworks introduced in class, but it is not necessary for the labs, where new directions and value propositions are expected to emerge through exploration. The course sparks reflection and provides tools to design sustainable professional pathways by encouraging a value-based interpretation of cultural and creative production, and by helping students identify market opportunities that also have a positive human impact. Final presentations consolidate the learning process into professional outputs that may serve as the basis for further incubation.

Instructors: Giuliano Picchi

Fall 2025 H1 / 6 Units

This half-semester course will introduce you to the transformative power of design innovation and entrepreneurship.   Through experiential learning in a workshop setting, you will begin to develop the skillset and mindset of an entrepreneur.  The leadership skills and curiosity of the entrepreneurial mind are qualities that are highly sought after across all industries and throughout the startup space.

An entrepreneur in the built environment is expected to identify problems and opportunities that will improve the human condition, and develop an effective solution for them. The course has an emphasis on framing a problem (before solving one) in order to understand the needs of people who experience them. The process to achieve this includes interviews, data collection and analytical observation.

You will identify real problems and work in teams to determine their scope, context and impact, and begin to develop a solution for them. Teams will create proposals for new ventures in the built environment, and in the process learn a methodology that will support a future as an entrepreneur in the fields of design, planning, construction, real estate, transportation and other related industries.

Instructors: Svafa Grönfeldt and Gilad Rosenzweig