Undergraduate Business of Creative Enterprises (BA)

The undergraduate Business of Creative Enterprises (BCE) program at Emerson College is among the first of its kind in the country. Our students are driven by a passion for arts and communication and interested in leading and managing businesses in the creative economy.

Bachelor’s Program in Business of Creative Enterprises

The on-campus Bachelor of Arts (BA) in BCE focuses on the interconnection between business strategy, creative thinking, and ideas, helping students learn about and adapt to an ever-changing economy. Students will prepare to become executives, managers, and innovators in new or existing creative enterprises in the arts and entertainment, communication, media, and publishing sectors.   

Students in the program will:

• Redefine existing business strategies and establish new practices in the creative economy;
• Develop the skill set needed to adapt and lead in changing and evolving fields;
• Identify emerging trends, communicate ideas, build communities, and connect to new markets;
• Create, analyze, interpret, and evaluate financial statements;
• Analyze risk and create action plans to support enterprise goals.

Curriculum

Our Business of Creative Enterprises curriculum draws its courses and faculty from the departments of Marketing Communication; Visual & Media Arts; Performing Arts; Communication Studies; and Writing, Literature & Publishing. In addition to real-world training in communication and the arts, students will work with industry leaders to develop a unique creative perspective and business acumen in a collaborative and supportive environment.

The Senior Residency

As the capstone of the BCE program, the Senior Residency is designed to reconnect the entirety of skills students have refined, accumulated, and workshopped since entering the program. Collaboration, aesthetic sensibility, organizational structure, and finance will be combined with lessons learned from students’ various electives and put to work in this class. The class will contain elements of both a traditional capstone and an internship but with more academic rigor and analysis, as well as collaboration with fellow students, professors, advisors, and clients.

Students, organized in groups, will spend a semester analyzing various businesses in the creative industry. Specifically, examining the following areas of the respective businesses. 

The class will be organized via modules where groups will examine different creative enterprises through the BCE lens. The focus of said analysis will be:

• Revenue and Monetization
• Marketing Strategy
• Hierarchy and Collaboration
• Ethics and Culture