Keywords

1 Introduction

Thailand’s government has been pushing “Creative Economy Policy” through the small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as development policies by funding major SMEs, manufacturing firms and agricultural firms to stimulate economic growth. The fact shows that those SMEs development policies cannot achieve economic objectives. There is less than 5 % of new firms can contribute to expected economic objectives. Major cause of failure is lack of “entrepreneur” who has business concepts and specific characteristics such as creativity, opportunity obsession, and risk taking etc.

In addition, successful entrepreneur possess not only innovative paradigm, but also solid management skill, business know-how, sufficient contacts and value creation ability: ability to create values from creativity to be innovation; as a result, short of Individual’s entrepreneurship causes the business unable to contribute new ideas, new knowledge, new products and services. Creativity and entrepreneurship are key success factors of creative economy driven policy. Understanding of relationship and mechanism between them will lead to economic growth rate and achievement. Although, there have been some research and practices in creativity and entrepreneurship under the assumption of the critical factors on how to create successful businesses but there are only limited studies in specific field, especially the relationship between creativity and entrepreneur.

The objective of this paper iso investigate the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurship by proposing the relational model. In this study, we have reviewed the literature on creativity, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial characteristics, and entrepreneurial factors. We will contribute mechanism of creativity formulation on a man and how to change them to be entrepreneur that will make us understanding process of creative economy development in the future.

2 What Is Creativity?

2.1 Definition of Creativity

In general, creativity is the ability to bring something new into existence [1]. Creativity are classified to be 7 contemporary approach [2], psychoanalytic, humanistic, environment, associative, factorial, cognitive-developmental and holistic.

First, psychoanalytic explains creativity as a behavioral manifestation of defense mechanism of sublimation, the unconscious process through with the individual directs his sexual or aggressive energies into culturally approach behavior, creativity as arising from conflict at young age and as representing a defense against “libidinal” energies injurious to society. Second, humanistic, shares with psychoanalytic thinking the overview, which posits man in conflict with society. But humanistic sees all defense mechanisms as preventing the individual from becoming himself, however, depends upon a social climate free from pressures for conformity or of stern evaluation. Third, the environment, it is believed that creativity is a natural outgrowth of favorable climate. The environmentalists’ emphasis is on the manipulation of the environmental variables to augment creativity product. Forth, associative regards creativity as the process of combining mutually distant associative elements of thought, the distribution of an individual is around ideas. The associative approach presumes that creativity is dependent upon an evenly balanced, or flat, associational system.

Fifth, factorial views creativity as a function of many separate intellective factors that are structure of intellect contains three dimensions, contents; information in the environment, operation; the kinds of intellectual activities by which information in process, and product; the forms that information takes after processing. Sixth, cognitive-developmental is established on psychology, subareas in perception. Theorist believes in infant lack of creativities. But them come from environment’s perception then grow and formation by psychological mechanism. Ideas are develop passed society and culture to be creativity. Finally, holistic, is aptly illustrated by two main constructs of autocentricity; the stage in which feeling states of the individual and sensory qualities of stimuli in the outside environment are not differentiated from one another and allocentricity; alternate between global attention, in which the whole object is perceived receptively, and selective attention, in which separate facets of the object are in turn actively grasped.

A most useful definition of creativity is a product or response will be judged creative to the extent that it is a novel and appropriate, useful, correct, or valuable response to the task at hand, and the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic [3], comes from a recent literature on social psychology [4].

2.2 Process of Creativity

There are 3 key factors in process of creativity [5]. The first is person that means personal experiences as background, education, society, and family. This factor is the foundation of knowledge and development, people always think toward what they see and perceive. The second is domain that means scope of school of thought, their belief, as scientists believe in evident but artist almost in feeling. The last factor is field, as persons who are gatekeepers to make decision “Creativity or not?” as gurus in each discipline.

Persons have personal ideas that were processed by their experience. They will receive knowledge and information from domain that they choose to believe. They will produce works in their principles that were decided to be creativity or not by field, guru or professional person in their disciplines. If it is not creativity, person will improve their idea again and again until passing “the creativity gate”. The creativity process is shown as Figs. 1 and 2.

Fig. 1
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Factors of creativity process

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Fig. 2
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Creativity process

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3 What Is Entrepreneur and Entrepreneurship?

3.1 Definition of Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur is defined by many theorists, for example, the person who organizes, operates and enterprise of personal gain [6]; who reforms or revolutionizes the production by exploiting an invention. Generally, an untried technological method of producing a new commodity product or producing old one in a new way, opening a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by organizing a new industry [7]; who brings resources, labor, materials, and other assets into combinations that make their value greater than before [8]; who undertakes the creation of an enterprise or business that has the chance of profit or success [9]; who has six dominant themes of behavior, commitment and determination are the first theme, the second is leadership, opportunity obsession, tolerance of risk, then is ambiguity, and uncertainty, other theme is creativity, self-reliance, and adaptability, and the last is motivation to excel [10]; individual who takes risks and starts something new [11]

Although the definition of entrepreneur are different according to the theories but it remains similar in their notions, for instant, managerial skill, creativity and opportunity obsession. To summarize all the definitions of entrepreneur, the following definition will be the foundation of this study: “Entrepreneurs are the persons who can find or create business opportunities and organizes the resources for their successes”.

3.2 Definition of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is identified into 6 domains which are under the school of thought, the great school, the managerial school, the leadership school, the entrepreneurship school and the psychological characteristics school [12]. A large number of researches is constructed on the psychological characteristics school that believes in the individuals, psychological factors and characteristics [13]. The school also believes in the association between psychological factors and characteristics that present in the term of behavior. The literature shows various entrepreneurial characteristics, which can be concluded into 6 types which are need for achievement, locus of control, propensity to take risk, tolerance of ambiguity, self-confidence, and innovation to separate those who have entrepreneurial characteristics [14]. By the way, to becoming an entrepreneur and acting as an entrepreneur are both aspect of the entrepreneur’s learning process and it was impacted by many factors [15].

Study of Gorman and Hanlon [16] they show education programs can be positively influenced to entrepreneurial attribute. Turker and Selcuk [17] propose the effective increasing entrepreneurial intention of university student that have 3 factors: additionally, educational support, structural support, and relational support. There are significant effects of university environment on student’s interest in business founding [18].

Entrepreneurial characteristic is influenced by many factors but there are 3 classical factors. The first is personality [19], need for achievement, risk taking propensity, internal locus of control, or innovativeness. The second factors are the attitude approach; personal attitude toward outcomes of behavior [20], perceived social norm, and perceived behavioral control [21]. The third is external factors; a person social network [22], the image of entrepreneur in [23], social culture norm and barriers to entrepreneurship [24]. In another study, the result shows the relationship between university environment and entrepreneur intent [25]. In study of Gorman and Hanlon, they show that the education programs can be positively influenced to entrepreneurial attribute [26]. Turker and Selcuk propose the effective increasing entrepreneurial intention of university student that have 3 factors: educational support, structural support, and relational support that are significant effects of university environment on student’s interest in business founding [27].

From the reviews, entrepreneurial factors are separated into 2 types show as Fig. 3. Firstly, internal factors which inclusive of personality and personal perceivable. Secondly, external factors which are social factors-family background, social environment, social norm, and education factors-teacher, curriculum, and university environment.

Fig. 3
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Entrepreneurial factors

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The partial inconsistency of the finding of previous studies indicates that there are gaps that can be improve to better understand entrepreneurial characteristics that can create high economic values. In particular, it seems to be crucial to develop interactive models with the aim of explaining mechanism of entrepreneurial factors as a driver in the future for creative economy development.

4 The Relationship between Creativity and Entrepreneurship

From the review, creativity is the important characteristic of entrepreneur. The mechanism of creative formulation is shacked by environment, external environment; supported by approach of environment and factorial, internal environment; supported by approach of psychoanalytic, and integrate environment; supported by approach of humanistic and associative, cognitive-developmental, and holistic.

Creative people who make creativity by integrating external factors and internal factors, contribute to creativity in imaginational word. The integrated mechanism of creative person can be explained in term of creativity, person; genetic pool and personal experiences, field; social system, and domain; culture [28]. A man who grow up in social system that is a result of culture, stays with their physical and biological properties. It is the most important mode of perception. Modes are personally stimulated by internal and external environment that will set personal mind and form to be creative people. In this paper, internal and external environment are personal stimuli (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
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Mechanism of creative people formulation

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Therefore, creative people are incubated by business environment who pass the mode of perception and come to be entrepreneur. Perception of business concept is affected by business environment condition, personality and personal perceivable as internal factors, and social and educational factors as external factors [29].

Afterward, norm of creative person will change to the real world and show in psychological outcome as psychological characteristics, need of achievement, locus of control, propensity to take risk, tolerance of ambiguity, and self-confidence [30]. Finally, creative person becomes entrepreneur and expresses results on psychological approach as Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
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Mechanism of entrepreneur formulation

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The mixing of 2 mechanism; creative people, and entrepreneur formulation, show the relationship between them as in Fig. 6. Personal stimuli, internal and external environment, effect to a man pass person, field, and domain. Furthermore, creativity forms in individual person, but it almost just creativity not practical in the real situation. The business environment condition in form of entrepreneurship stimuli will help set the real it up in the world.

Fig. 6
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Relationship between creative people and entrepreneur

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5 Conclusion

Creativity is one of the most important properties of entrepreneur. Entrepreneur uses background knowledge, internal and external factors, to formulated creativity. Not only creativity is not enough to achieve business, but also experience in business is requirement. Not all of creativity will turn into real business. They are filtrated by business environment, macro environment, micro environment, and internal factor as principle of strategic management [31]. After environmental filtration, permeate as creativity is developed by new product development process. Business concept is clarified and created through business plan, marketing, operation, and finance. Details in each plan and step will establish and contribute to practical plan [32, 33]. Finally, creativity transforms to innovation, commercial invention, key success factor in current business.

The chapter presents theoretical framework and relating compartment between creativity and entrepreneur. It focuses on mechanism of creativity formulation and entrepreneur formulation. There is evidence to support that creativity is the basic requirement for entrepreneur. Then business environment induces characteristic of creative people to be entrepreneur, comes from the imagination world to the real world.