Our Team
The Creative Enterprise Lab team is a group of passionate, experienced professionals dedicated to helping aspiring creative entrepreneurs thrive in the competitive world of creative business. Based in Gorey, Co. Wexford, Ireland, the team brings a distinctive mix of skills and expertise to every project. Led by founder, Ian Oliver, with many years of experience in the arts and creative industries and a proven track record of launching and scaling successful ventures and teaching creative entrepreneurship and creative thinking, the team is committed to delivering high-quality online courses and training programmes.
Founder - Ian Oliver
Creative Enterprise Lab was born out of long-term observation, lived experience, and frustration.
For decades, artists and creatives have been asked to be more entrepreneurial, adaptable, and resilient, while operating within systems that remain precarious, opaque, and often indifferent to the realities of creative work. Business education, where it exists, is frequently misaligned with artistic practice, focusing on growth at any cost rather than sustainability, wellbeing, or integrity.
CEL exists to challenge that model.
The Lab is not about turning artists into conventional entrepreneurs, nor about reshaping artistic work to fit market logic. It is about expanding the ways creative practice can support a living, on the artist's own terms. That means developing economic literacy, confidence, and agency, while acknowledging mental health, burnout, trauma, neurodiversity, and the emotional labour inherent in creative work.
CEL is grounded in practical experience, research, and long-term engagement with the creative sector. It combines enterprise education, mentorship, and community with a commitment to ethical economics, inclusion, and sustainability.
At its core, CEL asks a simple but urgent question:
What would the creative sector look like if artists were supported to survive, not just succeed?
Ian Oliver is a creative entrepreneur, educator, and cultural strategist working at the intersection of artistic practice, economic agency, and sustainability. For over 20 years, he has supported artists and creatives across all disciplines to develop viable and ethical ways of sustaining their work without compromising artistic integrity.
He has taught creative and artistic entrepreneurship since 2014, delivering project-based programmes, workshops, and mentoring to over 800 creatives, and has held senior leadership roles including Head of Entrepreneurship & Training Development at the Creative Entrepreneurs Academy and Head of Artistic & Creative Development at the Centre for Creative Practices.
Ian has worked with universities, cultural institutions, local authorities, and European partners, and has delivered keynote presentations and research on creative entrepreneurship across Ireland and the EU. His approach combines academic rigour, sector knowledge, and lived experience of creative work.
He is the founder of Creative Enterprise Lab (CEL), an initiative focused on developing sustainable income models for artistic practice while addressing mental health, precarity, and long-term resilience in the creative sector.