Purpose Digital transformation is rapidly reshaping the global cultural and creative industries, creating an urgent imperative for cultural entrepreneurs to integrate technological innovation with cultural value creation and to convert creative insights into market-ready offerings. While prior research has examined entrepreneurial leadership in digital contexts, the distinctive leadership roles, competencies and dynamic processes specific to cultural entrepreneurship remain under-investigated. This study, therefore, seeks to identify the unique leadership demands placed on cultural entrepreneurs during the transition from creativity to innovation and to uncover the underlying dynamic mechanisms driving this transformation. Design/methodology/approach Adopting a qualitative, multiple-case-study design, this study examined six Chinese cultural and creative enterprises selected to represent variation in firm size, regional cultural heritage and developmental stage. Data collection comprised in-depth, semi-structured interviews with founders and key stakeholders, reinforced by on-site participant observations. Findings The analysis yielded seven core leadership dimensions – identification and integration of cultural and creative resources, balancing artistry and commerce, cultural brand development, cross-cultural communication, digital content creation and platform operation, collaborative co-creation and intuition-driven decision-making and risk management – integrated into an open-ended, dynamically evolving digital leadership framework for cultural entrepreneurs. Three fundamental operational mechanisms were also identified: the synergy mechanism, the contextual dependency mechanism and the dynamic evolution mechanism. Moreover, findings reveal how leadership enactment varies systematically across different business life-cycle stages and cultural contexts. Originality/value This research extends the leadership theory in the cultural and creative sectors by applying a value-network perspective to digital leadership and by reconceptualizing it as a contextually embedded dynamic capability rather than a static individual attribute. In contrast to traditional frameworks grounded in the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theory, which primarily emphasize intra-firm strategic planning, technology integration and capital management, the proposed model foregrounds the dual mandate of cultural entrepreneurs to balance artistic integrity and commercial viability within multi-actor value networks. By uncovering seven leadership dimensions and three internal mechanisms:synergistic effect, contextual dependency and dynamic evolution, the study specifies how leadership unfolds through cross-boundary collaboration and creativity-to-innovation conversion, thereby offering a theoretically distinctive and empirically grounded contribution to both digital transformation and leadership research.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.