Entrepreneurship at the Margins: Rethinking Creative Business Education

By Jessie McGuire and Yura Kang

"Entrepreneurship at the Margins presents creative business education as a form of pedagogical research rather than a pipeline toward profit or venture-capital scale. Developed through ENPR-200-02: The Entrepreneurship Mindset, this project investigates how artists and designers build sustainable creative practices, circulate value, and engage public space while operating at the margins of dominant economic models.

Rather than focusing on startup outcomes or financial success, this research frames entrepreneurship as a public, ethical, and cultural practice. It asks how creativity is taught within an art and design school, who benefits from dominant entrepreneurship frameworks, and what alternative models of scale, sustainability, and accountability might emerge when value is not measured solely by growth or extraction.

The project uses pedagogy itself as a research method. Through critical annotation of canonical entrepreneurship texts, visual mapping of value circulation, and comparative institutional research into creative business programs, the work makes visible the assumptions embedded in mainstream entrepreneurship education. Marginalia, diagrams, and process documentation function as research artifacts that expose friction, refusal, and alternative imaginaries.

Presented at the Research Open House as an open research environment, the exhibition emphasizes inquiry over conclusion. Visitors encounter annotated texts, wall-based maps, and archival materials that trace how creative labor generates cultural, social, and institutional value beyond profit. The project contributes to ongoing conversations about how art and design schools can prepare students to sustain creative practice in complex economic environments and positions Pratt as a site for rethinking entrepreneurship education in ways that are ethically grounded, publicly engaged, and responsive to creative practice today."