Define

Perhaps you are farther along in your creative pursuits and looking to combine your existing skills and launch or bolster a full creative business. madelife is here to support your creative foundation and help you fill in the missing technical, business, or logistic elements. We begin the program with an in-depth orientation where we identify your core questions, ideas, and goals for your Creative Business. Working with a madelife creative team consisting of Mentors, a Coordinator, and additional support staff, we help Accelerants develop overall program goals. Then it’s time to plan the first project. Accelerants develop a strategy for their projects using a pre-project form that outlines goals, resources needed, skills to be developed, and real-world factors such as time, cost, and desired client feedback. Now that the plan is in place, it’s time to start creating!

Create

Creative accelerants test their creative product and move their business forward. The heart of the Creative Business program is the project sprints completed by Accelerants. During these 1 – 2 week intensive project sprints, Accelerants test their creative product and move their business forward. From producing a prototype, to managing your business books, these projects focus in on a specific topic, skill set, or outcome designed by Accelerants and their creative support team. What better place to launch a creative business then at the center of a Creative Community like madelife with access to a vast amount of talent and resources.

Measure

How do you move forward? So you printed a run of your line and all of the colors were off? Or you hired a contractor and she didn’t work out? How to you move forward?

Instead of getting lost in the emotional highs and lows that come with completing a project, let’s measure each project objectively. Accelerants begin by compiling feedback, both internally from self-assessments and externally from their Mentors, Coordinator, and the greater Creative Community. Accelerants then take this feedback and measure their objective success with tools such as the post-project reflection form to compare project goals with project outcomes and to judge for themselves the success of their projects. Working closely with their creative team, Accelerants leverage the successes and failures of their past projects to refine their plan and pivot their strategy moving forward. This Define, Create, Measure loop helps Accelerants improve their technical and professional skills and develop a creative resiliency that they are able to bring into their career long after the 12-week program is over.