Organisations have, traditionally, considered the arts, at best, as something nice to have and to support for socio-cultural reasons, an accessory with little impact on organisational value creation. The Value of Arts for Business discloses the relevance of the arts as a means by which management can enhance organisational value-creation capacity and boost business performance. It will investigate why and how the arts, in the form of Arts-based Initiatives (ABIs), can represent a powerful management tool for developing employees and organisational infrastructure that can drive superior value creation.

Beginning with the definition of the principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Taylor (1911), management, in both theory and practice, has been essentially focused in the design, implementation, assessment and control of the rational and engineering characteristics that drive the working mechanisms of organisations and the achievement of strategic objectives. The positivistic approach has dominated the development of modern management, with its paraphernalia of models, approaches and tools providing interpretative and normative guidelines for management initiatives, both to affect the efficiency of organisational processes and to drive business growth. The fundamental idea of the modern management paradigm has been that it is possible to define and manage organisations essentially as an efficient system able to achieve, without inconvenience and/or unexpected negative events, the targeted business objectives. In accordance with this view, the arts have not had any role to play in management.