18 years ago, REMIX Co-founders Simon Cronshaw and Peter Tullin wrote Intelligent Naivety as a handbook for Cultural Entrepreneurs.
Back then, we were convinced of their transformative power to reach new audiences and deliver financially sustainable models for arts and culture.
Today that belief is just as strong – but we’re much wiser to the traps and barriers. We’ve seen the burnout of startup models, the challenges of sustaining innovation within institutions, and the harsh realities of Big Tech’s dominance.
Throughout 2025, Simon has been working with Ellen O’Hara, Lisa Westcott Wilkins and Dr Brendon Wilkins to deep-dive into the state of cultural innovation today. They wanted to think across institutions, startups and sub-sectors to spot what’s working – and what might be possible.
Since that first handbook in 2008, the Cultural Entrepreneur has evolved:
- They’re building new cultural interfaces to make excellence accessible
- Their business models are grounded in committed communities
- They value coherence over scale
- They choose depth over distraction
Here is their new blueprint. View and download it below.
An exciting new era of Cultural Entrepreneurship has only just begun.
FULL TEXT
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs
01.2026 · Simon Cronshaw, Ellen O’Hara, Lisa Westcott Wilkins
a coming of age
For two decades, cultural innovation has been trapped between two exhausted models: the risk-averse ‘fortress’ of many institutions, and the burnout culture of new cultural startups – modelled on the Silicon Valley playbook of disruptive disintermediation.
Both have failed.
In 2008 Intelligent Naivety offered a blueprint for marrying culture and commerce: a way to reach new audiences and to create sustainable financial models.
18 years on, the Cultural Entrepreneur has evolved. They are not here to simply disrupt, but to rebuild; to make excellence accessible. Driven by purpose and grounded in community, they value coherence over scale and depth over distraction. This is their new blueprint.
led by ‘why’
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs put their “why” first. They’ve learnt from social enterprises and B Corps, starting with the words: “I want to live in a world where…”.
Their clarity enables coherence – a state of alignment where profit and purpose tell the same story.
They find a crowd that agrees with them, and that values what they offer enough to financially sustain it for the long term.
They live for the marathon, not a sprint.
collaboration as infrastructure
Building a cultural enterprise has changed.
Past founders accumulated power. The New Cultural Entrepreneurs reject this positional authority and regard collaboration as infrastructure.
By prioritising trust and collective ownership, they no longer hoard assets and insights – choosing instead to build squads of like-minded people to share the weight.
Success is no longer about individual endurance. It’s about the conditions created for everyone to thrive.
no grind
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs reject startup grind culture.
They’ve seen the dangers. Non-stop work, hustling and all-nighters only lead to burnout.
Founders are 50% more likely to have mental health conditions. Founders are twice as likely to suffer from depression, suicidal thoughts and have psychiatric hospitalisation. Founders are three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse.
Poor mental health kills performance and potential.
enoughness
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs do less, better.
They practice enoughness: a disciplined choice to focus and build strength. A sufficiency mindset.
Not retreat or scarcity, but clarity.
Rather than chasing growth at all costs, they right-size: “How big do we actually need to be to do our best work?”
Not “What else can we add?” but “What could we let go of to strengthen what matters most?”
coherence
Enoughness enables coherence.
It ties all activity into a recognisable whole from day one. Alignment, not uniformity.
New Cultural Entrepreneurs add selectively, choosing new initiatives only where they reinforce the core purpose.
They balance wisely, leading where they are distinctive; collaborating where coherence is collective.
And they subtract courageously, killing activities that blur the story – even when they are familiar or comfortable.
distinctiveness
Internal coherence allows for external distinctiveness.
Like their users, the New Cultural Entrepreneurs are tech-literate but tech-sceptical. In an age of algorithmic uniformity, they know value returns to the unique.
They offer fallible, unpredictable human curation, primed for serendipitous discovery – not an algorithmic loop of what’s gone before.
Fewer, deeper moments of total absorption, rather than thousands of fleeting encounters.
selling ‘pause’
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs see beauty in finite focus, not infinite distraction. They are selling ‘pause’ to an exhausted world.
A desire for real connection: small, private online spaces – not the tiresome, noisy egos of the so-called ‘public squares’.
Offering moments that slow you down or stop you in your tracks.
Work that is valuable before it is shared.
community
Business models for New Cultural Entrepreneurs are built on community.
After a decade of Big Tech mediating culture, the mid-2020s offer a reset. The landscape is fracturing into niche, high-trust communities. This is a chance to reclaim direct relationships.
These communities are actively tended. In exchange for commitment, the New Cultural Entrepreneurs share stakes and rewards.
IRL connections are essential. Online is just a means to an end of facilitating nourishing, offline interactions.
excellence for all
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs seek to make excellence accessible.
Despite decades of investment in audience development, attendance demographics remain static. Social mobility is regressing.
Most people can love the ‘profound’ of the cultural sector, but only if they’re offered the tools to navigate it.
Excellence cannot stay vibrant in a vacuum.
the new cultural interface
For the New Cultural Entrepreneurs, the ‘product’ is not just the work on stage or on the wall; it’s the entire pathway.
A free ticket is meaningless without the confidence to use it. For ‘outsiders’, galleries and theatres can be terrifying: fear of not knowing the rules; of not understanding.
All creative expression draws from a deep human well of identity, memory and imagination. The raw materials for connection are there.
Disengagement is a failure of experience design, not the audience.
reimagine the journey
Marketing sells tickets; scaffolding builds confidence: It ‘translates’ artistic codes into familiar language and experiences – providing context, entry points and narrative hooks to unlock complexity.
Gateway Experiences: Low-risk, social, shorter, affordable ‘first dates’ act as vital infrastructure to build cultural confidence. Crossover genres and familiar settings help ground the unfamiliar.
Passport to Community: New audiences come for people and occasion. A collective experience builds a community, atmosphere, belonging – and mitigates the unfamiliarity of the art.
Validating Social Codes: Offering a variety of interfaces that validate the audience’s existing norms, rather than demanding they change their behaviour just to engage.
bridge the gap
The public is outside, hungry for meaning. But many cultural institutions are trapped in a fortress leadership style – guarding assets and prioritising self-protection.
When decision-making is pushed upwards “just in case”. Or innovation is confined to pilots that never threaten the core.
They survive but lose relevance.
The New Cultural Entrepreneurs provide the scaffolding to bridge this gap. They build the agile interfaces that allow the public to scale the fortress walls.
institutional platforms
Not every good idea should become an internal function.
Dynamic institutions can be platforms as well as providers. They can offer their core assets – stages, collections, spaces, expertise, audiences – for New Cultural Entrepreneurs to flourish.
Cultural leadership should be an act of service to the wider ecosystem rather than a defence of institutional territory.
Institutional expertise stewards the infrastructure upon which the New Cultural Entrepreneurs can build agile and accessible interfaces.
Allowing innovation to emerge from the edge rather than just the centre.
THE NEW CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURS
A future built on coherence, not clutter.
Their golden thread of purpose avoids the startup traps of the past.
With squads of believers, they share infrastructure, risk and rewards.
Building new cultural interfaces to make excellence accessible.
They are right-sized, radical and ready.