The market for meaning: A new entrepreneurial approach to creative industries dynamics

Economists have long sought to better understand how cultural value is transformed into economic value in creative industries. We propose a three-phase model for this mechanism in which the economic creation of cultural value begins with private cultural production and consumption from which a cultural entrepreneur discovers or perceives meaning. A cultural trajectory then unfolds through a second phase as meaning is refined, tested, developed into a shared experience in a cultural market. In the third phase, meaning is organized into an economic and cultural form and feeds back into cultural production. We illustrate this model of a ‘market for meaning’ with a case study of K-pop. We discuss implications of our model for theories of the entrepreneurial process and theories of cultural and creative industries.