Strategic Creativity For Your Entrepreneurial Future
Strategic creativity empowers your organization to meet challenges and shape the future with confidence. At the ZCCE of the Zurich University of the Arts, we connect research and practice to provide leadership teams, SMEs, cultural institutions, creative enterprises, and public organizations with Research as a Service for their strategic development. Our work builds on many years of collaboration with national and international partners who are among the leading actors in culture, business, technology, science, and politics.
Client Group
Our services are designed for a wide range of organizations: businesses, SMEs, cultural institutions, creative companies, and public organizations. We work with leadership teams and teams in creative processes, helping them develop new strategies, implement innovative ideas, and advance their organizations strategically.
Our Approach: Strategic Creativity as a Service
As critical companions (Critical Friends), we open up spaces for thinking and action for organizations that want to actively shape their future. Research as a Service means developing smart and relevant questions – such as “What’s possible?” and “What if?” – and jointly exploring what viable answers to these questions might look like.
Research enables perspective shifts, surprising comparisons with other contexts, thinking across relevant time horizons, entrepreneurial experiments, established models, and empirical insights. Every organization is unique – many solutions already exist. Through targeted questions, unconventional tools, and inspiring examples, we make these solutions visible and further developable for the present and future of the organization.
We work strategically with creative companies and organizations, mostly in longer-term, co-designed engagements. As Critical Friends, we leverage our partners’ existing platforms while also developing new formats. We make visionary ideas tangible and actionable, connecting current research with creative practice in a critical, constructive, and implementation-oriented way – reliable and careful in our collaboration.
Our approach is shaped by curiosity and openness: we experiment, unravel complexity, and think against the grain. This approach shapes the ZHdK as one of Europe’s major universities of the arts, where all disciplines are united under one roof, and makes its implementation in this form unique.
Key Questions of Our Collaboration
Our Research as a Service approach are not rigid modules but focused spaces for dialogue, centred around the key entrepreneurial challenges of your organisation. Each core question opens up room for in-depth exploration – whether it’s developing new narratives, sharpening your value proposition, or mobilising internal and external partners.
People
We are your independent companions – entrepreneurially experienced, research-based, and thought leaders in strategic creativity.
Simon Grand
Researcher & Author, Strategy Designer & Knowledge Entrepreneur
Permanent Research Fellow for Strategic Creativity and Creative Entrepreneurship at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Titular Professor of Strategic Management and Management Innovation at the University of St. Gallen. Board member of globally active family businesses. And an entrepreneur himself.
Christoph Weckerle
Expert in Creative Economies
Founder and Director of the Zurich Centre for Creative Economies (ZCCE) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). As a professor, he teaches and researches the cultural sector and advises organisations nationally and internationally.
The Toolbox for Our Work
Our book, Strategic Creativity: Shaping the Future to Transform the Present, provides models and guiding questions with which we collaboratively develop your specific answers. Published in 2024 by Versus Verlag, it serves as both the theoretical foundation and practical inspiration for our research-based services.
About the book
Our Business Model
We see Strategic Creativity as a Service as a research-based offering. Your investment directly supports ongoing research – creating a virtuous cycle where practice and academia strengthen one another.
Contact
If you have any questions or if our approach appeals to you, we would be happy to start a conversation. Let’s find out over a coffee how we can challenge you and your organisation and help you move forward.
Email to Simon Grand and Christoph Weckerle