This year has been a really special one, we started with the first team ever in LEINN Arts. We have been dreaming about creating an artistic program since 2018, and now we can say that it is a reality.
Welcome to the official bachelor’s degree in Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation in Arts and Creative Industries!
All this adventure started when… wait, wait! I’m going to introduce myself first. My name is Oihane and I’m a contemporary artist from the Basque Country. Now yes… All this adventure started when I got the opportunity to participate in the Africa Basque Challenge, a boot camp organized by Mondragon Team Academy (MTA). It’s aim was to create teams of young Kenyan and Basque entrepreneurs to solve the challenge between the rural and urban gap.
I got shocked when during the bootcamp I started to get to know different young entrepreneurs and their projects. The first thing that I thought was, where have I been all these years? These guys have a degree for entrepreneurship in my city and I don’t even know what the word means. My second surprise was when I realized (after understanding what entrepreneurs do and how they think) that I already was an entrepreneur without knowing it. In the bootcamp, it was mind blowing to see how useful it was for artists to have all these knowledge about creating projects based on passion and values that these people from MTA had.
In one of these magical conversations with Jose Mari Luzarraga (Co-founder of MTA) I asked him if there was a place where it was possible to learn Arts and Entrepreneurship with the Learning by doing methodology that in MTA have. He said no, but if you want we can create it.
From then on, we started to build a path for Arts Entrepreneurship. Based on LEINN which is the official bachelors degree in Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation created by MTA, we created LEINN Arts.
LEINN Arts is a LEINN degree that combines all the wisdom and methodology of LEINN applied to nurture & train entrepreneurs and creative change makers in the fields of arts, creative and cultural industries. Through the learning process they gain understanding and connections from the field and get to experiment different concepts from art and creative processes to innovate & create new entrepreneurial projects in teams.
We have designed LEINN Arts as a four years challenge of intense and exciting work. A journey to become world citizens with a global vision and the ability to translate it into real artistic and cultural projects that can change their environment. The degree aims on educating creative changemakers with strong social values and who understand the company as an instrument to build the world they want.
As an important part of the degree, the learning methodology is completed with international creation journeys where creative entrepreneurs have the opportunity to become global professionals by being able to meet and interact with different cultures and meet and collaborate with other international entrepreneurs, artists and experts. These trips train the participants to work in a globalized, multilingual and culturally diverse world. In LEINN Arts, creation journeys allow a direct relationship with the most important spots regarding creative industries worldwide: Berlin,Bilbao, New York and Bogota.
In LEINN Arts they merge three strategic partners (Mondragon Team Academy (MTA), Travelling University and Last Tour) who come together to revolutionise the Creative and Cultural Industries through university education. They combine more than 12 years of experience in entrepreneurship and leadership education and international training of global teams, with the knowledge of one of the most innovative cultural institutions in Europe.
Travelling University was born within the MTA network as a transformative learning experiences platform that seeks to generate hybrid experiences and emotions. From its beginning, it has aimed to add the strength of different universities around the world to offer comprehensive experiences.
Last Tour is currently one of the most active and innovative cultural agents in Europe. Born as a promoter of tours and festivals (Azkena Rock Festival, Bilbao BBK Live, Donostia Festibala), the company’s activity in the music sector is nowadays broad and diverse encompassing record publishing, artist representation and advice on or the design of experiences for brands. With the creation of BIME, one of the most relevant professional meetings in the music industry today, Last Tour has also become part of the main driving forces of the sector in Europe and Latin America.
As I mentioned in the introduction, LEINN Arts is now a reality and we are proud to introduce the pioneering team. We have young creatives from Spain, Hungary and Nigeria who work on different creative fields such as fashion, music, photography, video making, sustainability…
I would like to end reinforcing the importance of arts, creation, creativity, disruption… in these times. The other day, a friend told me that maybe we have chosen the worst era in human history to create an international bachelor’s degree in arts and entrepreneurship. It may seem so, but I disagree. Robots are not going to create culture, so we need passionate young creatives to reinvent the way we think and live the world. If we don’t have art, what do we have?
