About ICCE

ICCE delivers entrepreneurship, cultural management and policy education to the creative and cultural sectors, and supports research into new approaches to business, financial models and management in the Creative Economy.

It delivers a range of academic programmes and presents activities and events to promote an environment in which creative and cultural entrepreneurship can flourish. Our approach is to integrate entrepreneurship within the development of creative practices, and to take a creative approach to the development of new businesses and the infrastructure that supports them.

ICCE is Goldsmiths' response to the growing significance of the creative industries and cultural sector in the UK’s economy.  Figures have shown that the creative industries account for 9% of the UK’s GDP and a rising part of its export trade and total employment. Business skills, management skills and entrepreneurial skills with a specific understanding of the sector are needed to support its continued growth.

Goldsmiths’ reputation as a leading provider of creative education, and its longstanding engagement with cultural practice and analysis, make it the ideal home for ICCE. Engagement with the creative industries and the not-for-profit cultural sector has long existed across many of Goldsmiths’ academic departments and research centres. What makes ICCE different is its interdisciplinarity. Artistic creativity increasingly blurs the old boundaries of subject disciplines such as music, drama, dance, fine art, design, communications, media and technology. ICCE serves as an area for experimentation, where all of these disciplines can come together to learn from each other and to develop new creative alliances.

ICCE’s diversity of engagement goes beyond the academic disciplines. ICCE also engages directly with external partners from the creative industries and from other specialist higher education institutions. Some of our partners are actively involved in curriculum development or in providing training opportunities, whilst others act in an advisory capacity. Through their direct engagement, all of them ensure that ICCE’s courses and other activities address the priorities and needs of the growing creative and cultural sector itself. 

"Goldsmiths has demonstrated its strengths at the cutting edge of the creative industries. Its teaching programmes and research engage with some of the leading areas of the sector. The College’s students in the key subjects are much in demand by employers once they graduate, although many of them choose to set up freelance enterprises of their own, while its research and knowledge transfer activities are of increasing importance in a fast-growing creative economy where new knowledge and its transmission is fundamental to key elements in the value chain. Goldsmiths academics and students have been increasingly involved with the business sector in the creative industries. In doing so they have been supported by the College’s reorganised Business Development Office and a concomitant process to reshape the environment for business interaction, not least by new approaches to intellectual property issues.

"ICCE's location in London is critical to its attraction and to what it has to offer. The creative industries are the second largest sector in London’s economy. It is a sector that thrives on demanding customers, innovative ideas, knowledge and skills provided through leading educational and research institutions, and intermediaries linking often small creative enterprises to markets and supply chains. London is a very specific location for such a new institute, and its location would make the resources of what is arguably the world’s most dynamic creative and cultural global city available to the students and programmes of ICCE. There is no better city in which this new venture could be located."

Geoffrey Crossick
Warden of Goldsmiths
2008