The anthropology of art may seem a very strange place to get inspiration from when what this seminar will address is how to engage a prospective investor in your latest great idea, whether it be for a new business, a product or service. However, you will be surprised.

We will begin with what might be difficult to accept. You know what you’re talking about, you love your idea, and you are emotionally tied to it, but others won’t know, won’t love it, and prefer their own ideas—'thanks all the same’.

As far as potential investors are concerned, you might just as well be offering them a blank sheet of paper, or a black box. Which is where the work of the anthropologist Alfred Gell could really make a difference to your buyer engagement strategy. He suggests that artworks are effectively blank, opaque things without meaning to those who are invited to engage with them by an artist—at least initially. To complicate matters, any meaning or understanding that is attached to them by the ‘prospective investor’ may be different to that meant by the artist (or inventor or would-be entrepreneurs). This is the starting point from which a buyer-engagement strategy might be developed.

The seminar is part of the exhibition and seminar series entitled:

From Lucy to Language to a Culture of Enterprise and Innovation.

This exhibition is inspired partly by the BBC’s popular History of the World in a Hundred Objects.  We take a selected series of objects from the times of human origins up to the modern age, and explore their themes – stone technology, fire, cave art, and complex worlds – and add to these seminars on key aspects of enterprise and innovation.   The exhibits show how objects are at the very core of what it is to be human, and integral to the networks of relationships we call communities, societies, organizations and enterprises. Rarely are social networks simply that - they are more truly sociotechnical. They are enabled and held together by invented and engineered artefacts.  Every artefact, invention or artwork, or corporate brand logo embodies an opportunity to learn about culture at the level of nation, region, or even an individual enterprise.

The exhibition runs between 1st and 4th of November at Liverpool University's Foresight Centre. Entrance is free.

See http://lucy2languageexhibition.eventbrite.com.

Other seminars in the series.

 http://lucy2languageimagesoforganisations.eventbrite.com

http://lucy2languagesocialbrain.eventbrite.com