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-based services 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 reflection and action, develop new narratives, and turn innovative ideas into reality – through dialogue, research-driven insight, and practical engagement.
We don’t rely on ready-made answers – we focus on smart questions.
Every organisation is unique. With the guiding questions “What’s possible?” and “What if?”, we jointly develop new and unexpected perspectives and courses of action for the present and the future.
Many solutions already exist within your organisation – we help make them visible, refine them, and bring them into focus through targeted questioning, unconventional tools, and inspiring examples.
We make visionary ideas tangible and actionable, critically and constructively linking current research with creative practice – always reliable and meticulous in how we work.
Our approach is shaped by curiosity and openness: we embrace experimentation, unravel complexity, and think against the grain. This approach is unique to ZHdK – one of Europe’s leading universities of the arts, bringing together all artistic disciplines under one roof.
Key Questions of Our Collaboration
Our research-based services 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