By Dr. Peter Lorange
There are multiple ways to assess a new business venture – but have you ever thought of evaluating it by reference to artworks? Peter Lorange has!
In this novel study, Peter Lorange explores the use of art to assess the quality of new venture projects. With reference to some 80 pieces of art from his own collection, he considers the validity or otherwise of evaluating start-up proposals by drawing parallels between them and selected artworks.”
Introduction
This article falls into three parts. First, we will discuss what seem to be five particularly critical success factors for making new ventures work. Then we’ll talk about 10 success factors from art that we suggest might be used to check the realism of various new ventures. Finally, we apply this methodology to three real-world cases.
A recent study of success factors for start-ups in the EU emphasized the importance of intangible resources, like innovation, entrepreneurship, intellectual capital, and managerial relationships
Key success factors for new business project start-ups can be many. For instance, a recent study of success factors for start-ups in the EU emphasized the importance of intangible resources, like innovation, entrepreneurship, intellectual capital, and managerial relationships (2020). Another study, a meta-analysis synthesizing findings from three empirical studies (Sony et al., 2008), identified some 24 success factors, and highlighted eight factors that consistently correlated with strong venture performance.
Let us briefly introduce five factors, consistent with the above findings, that indicate what successful new business ventures might entail.
This author suggests the following five issues:
How original is the unique new business idea? Christensen’s classification of innovations (Christensen, 2022) might offer useful insights here. Christensen classifies innovations into three major groups. For new business ventures to be successful it seems important that the key business idea might be classified as truly original, i.e., based on a core idea that might be path-breaking.
- Customers. There will typically be a wide array of customers, ranging from early adopters, through “mainstreamers” to more conservative, late followers. Is it realistic to expect customers to adopt a new product or service, now a central part of the new venture? Can a fair number of customers be expected to conclude that the benefits from switching might be sufficiently larger than sticking to the already existing product or service? Further, is it likely that customers will stick to this new offering beyond the initial trial phase?
- Competition. There will typically be existing companies that produce comparable products or services. Can we expect the new product or service to have a sufficiently competitive price, to come on stream fast enough, and to have sufficiently good quality? We see much of this play out in the automotive industry today, where Chinese car producers seem to be able to offer electric cars at higher quality and lower price than their US and European competitors.
- Technological competence base. Is it realistic to expect that a given new business venture project can be meaningfully produced? Are the requisite manufacturing competences in place? See, for instance, Bilanz, 2025.
- Financial. It may be a matter of having sufficient financial resources. Some new ventures are able to be taken public early on, initially growing without showing profits. We saw that with Tesla, for instance. Other new ventures are able to self-finance their own growth, typically by restricting dividend payouts. An example might be the German liquid Omega-3 distributor Norsan. But most new ventures rely on additional venture capital. It will be critical that there is sufficient venture capital, paid in and committed. Many promising new ventures fail due to lack of sufficient additional funding.
We will discuss three new business ventures, all stemming from own experience. One is to introduce a new way to ship live salmon. A second is to develop a more cost-effective business school, in contrast to conventional business schools with expensive faculty and staff. A third is to develop a virtual network for learning.
Let us now discuss how testing of such ventures might be held up against art criteria.
Art
Eighty pieces of art from the author’s collection were classified into 10 categories used to test the validity of new venture projects. It seemed that this testing process might “ensure” realism. Let us now provide brief descriptions of each of these categories.
While no definite classification scheme is presently known, several classification schemes have been developed; see Magnussen and Ross (2023) in particular. There are also additional sources that seem to lend credence to our approach that art can be classified into categories that relate to various business decision-making aspects (Hetland and Winner, 2001). Also, the author drew on his own experience, having himself pursued more than 30 new venture projects (see Lorange, 2022; 2024). Many of these ended up as part of the investment portfolio of S. Ugelstad Invest (SUI), a wholly owned investment firm that has indeed been very successful. This might provide some indication that many of these new business ventures were successful. Art thus served as an additional quality check.
Let us now briefly present each of the 10 categories. For each we will also indicate some works of art that have been assigned to a given category. Photos of the various art pieces can be found in Lorange (2024).
- Quality. The contribution of quality to business performance is well known (Forker et al., 1996). To what extent could a particular new business project be of a comparable quality to particular pieces of art? Works by Kirkeby, Sörensen, or Rian fall into this category.
- Diversity. Artists that have works included in this group included Melgaard, Caviano, and Dahmen. What the author was trying to check here was whether a new project seemed to be sufficiently broad, in contrast to more narrow, independent silos (Aaker, 2008).
- Risk and uncertainty. We know that risk represents something that might be seen as finite, quantifiable, while uncertainty is something that to a degree might be impacted by one’s own assessments (Bhide, 2025; Harper et al. 2025). Important artists might include Miro and Jorn (Novelli and Spina, 2024).
- Networking. Might a given project also lead to a broader interaction with other organizational entities? Works by Jenssen, Svallastoga and, again, Jorn were particularly helpful here (Riegel, 2022).
- Speed. To check for what one might anticipate as being sufficient speed for a new venture project might often be critical. Here the author drew on works by Weidemann, Tinguely, and Atlan (Atkinson and Barry, 2010; Kownatzki et al., 2013).
- Cycle management. One might observe that particular business factors often follow patterns of underlying cycles in their developments, such as shipping freight rates, ship values, or interest rates, for instance (see Lorange, 2020; Zannetoz, 1970). Here the author drew extensively on works by Bergmann (Navarro et al., 2008).
- Discipline. The author interpreted this as rigor, another key aspect for how new successful business ventures might be put together. Artists such as Klee, Innes, and Penck seemed to be particularly powerful (Cahyati et al., 2024).
- Proactivity. Would a new business venture point clearly towards the future, or would it be more focused on ameliorating aspects of the past? Non-linear, new / creative thinking might thus be particularly key. Heramb, Kielland, and Kjaer (all Norwegian artists) provided clear inspiration here (Chang et al., 2022).
- Positivity. It might perhaps be a little naïve to look for a positive outlook for a given totally new venture, in contrast to those focused on solving some old problems. But in the author’s experience, it might nevertheless be particularly important to look for such positivity, rather than to fall into a negative, problem-solving mode. Stella, Wiederberg, and Kavli seemed to reinforce positivity (Cameron et al., 2011).
- Honesty / integrity. This factor is indeed quite overlapping with earlier factors such as discipline or positivity. Aspects of dishonesty relating to new projects should be avoided. Kröyer, Much or Bill were particularly key here (Rellie and Park, 2022).
Three examples
Let us now discuss three examples of new business development. All three seem to satisfy the first success criterion listed, namely, to be promoting major, original new business ideas. Beyond this, however, the projects seemed to measure up differently on the other criteria, now to be discussed.
Project One:
A new type of live salmon carrier. Conventional salmon carriers, for freighting salmon from sea arms to slaughterhouses, have rectangular tanks, stretching over the length of the ships, with two to three such tanks in parallel. The salmon, being a directional fish, typically swim towards the front end of each tank, with the back part of each tank being virtually empty. The innovative new design featured three circular tanks instead, with water pressure regulation to simulate counter-streams, more or less similar to the level found in small rivers, a favorite environment for salmon. The live salmon were swimming around evenly distributed in the tanks. Salmon freighted this way seemed to be less stressed, critically important to achieve good taste when the fish were slaughtered. “Happy” fish, not stressed, was key!
The project never took off, however. Several “required” success factors seemed to be absent. First, the marketing focus seemed to be missing. Second, there seemed to be a lack of adequate technological competences for building ships of this design. Thus, control dimensions from art seemed to signal that this project would not have the right of life. Two dimensions stood out, in particular, namely risk and uncertainty, as well as networking, both indicating “problems ahead”. It was indeed acknowledged by the shipyard that was to build the ship that the risk would be high for constructing such a new prototype. Such a ship might not function as intended. The uncertainties associated with building the three circular tanks were seen as particularly difficult. Further, we were not able to find longer-term employment contracts. A particular shipowner, who happened to own a large fleet of conventional salmon carriers, was negative, probably being afraid of making his conventional fleet obsolete. We then tried to take over the majority share of this firm but were stopped. The by-laws had several clauses that supported the existing strategy. So, in the end, the project was cancelled.
Project Two:
Lorange Institute: Launching a new business school turned out to be a success. The art dimensions seemed to add credence to this, particularly when it came to proactivity and speed. Conventional models for running high-quality business schools typically imply relatively high salary costs, particularly to run undergraduate or graduate teaching programs, conducted in finite-size classrooms, and with relatively short classroom sessions for entire semesters. Designated faculty, in particular, but also additional staff tend to be expensive. The Lorange Institute was started with the assumption that no permanent faculty might be required, and also that only a smaller fixed staff might be needed. The new school’s emphasis shifted towards running longer modules on weekends.
This new venture was successful. There were particularly two test factors that pointed towards success. Proactivity. This new approach seemed to involve lower costs than would typically be the case in conventional business schools. Thus, tuition levels might be held at a more reasonable rate. The focus on weekend class deliveries also made it more feasible for students to combine their studies with paying jobs. While research was not carried out at the Lorange Institute per se, participating faculty members did research as part of their assignments “back home”. Thus, they were of high “quality”. Speed was also a key factor to indicate success, the facilities where Lorange Institute was located on Lake Zurich, formerly the Zurich Graduate School of Business, ensuring a “flying start”. And there were no institutional committee structures, no faculty committees!
After about five years of operation the successful Lorange Institute was sold to CEIBS, a leading Shanghai-based business school, which was looking for a European base for training its students in European business issues. The price they offered made it attractive for the author to sell!
Project Three:
Lorange Network. This project tried to develop a virtual network to exchange more effective business practices and learning, as we also saw in Project Two, but, this time it did not work out as intended. Two factors seemed to be lacking. There were not enough customers who would be ready for this approach. And the author, who provided the sole source for financing the project, had decided to set relatively tight limits regarding how much funds to allocate.
When the 10 test categories from art were applied to the project, there were two “red flags” that emerged: lack of quality and lack of discipline. Conventional business schools typically involve relatively finite groups of students positioned to learn together (a maximum classroom size of around 100 students places natural limits on the richness of such interaction). Also, students would typically have to relocate to a school’s campus – further adding restrictions on the network for the learners. The Lorange Network, on the other hand, would create entirely virtual learning experiences, also featuring interviews with leading practitioners, book reviews, lectures, technical notes, and so on. There were reasonable fees to be paid by the participants.
This new venture did not work, perhaps primarily corroborated by negative readings of the following two critical success factors: Quality. There were no prerequisites regarding enrolling participants. Some of these were highly educated, while others had little to no previous schooling! Some were very senior, with a lot of experience, while others were inexperienced juniors! This led to a lack of realistic cross-personal learning, so critical for building new non-linear knowledge (Aaker, 2008; Tett, 2022). There was simply too little quality in the network! Discipline was another key indicator tested for. Gradually it became clear to the author that an excessive amount of own energy would have to be spent on the delivery, cum the author’s capacity as Chairman of Lorange Network. In the end, the author simply did not have sufficient energy or discipline to fully deliver. After three years, the Network was sold to IMD.
Conclusions
To successfully develop new business ventures is critical for economies to grow, for new business to be built. But, to actually come up with realistic new ventures is not easy. Each of the factors that need to be in place for a venture to be successful can often represent formidable challenges, hence also the need for post-factum testing, where the arts come in.
To successfully develop new business ventures is critical for economies to grow, for new business to be built. But, to actually come up with realistic new ventures is not easy.
This author has come up with a way to draw on art to get better indications regarding whether given ventures might be likely to succeed. By testing, after a project’s initial completion, how a project might stack up when it comes to various aspects of art, a way to “control” a project’s realism ex post facto might be achieved. For testing purposes, the author’s art collection of some 80 works was classified into some 10 groups, each one with its particular label to provide additional control through testing regarding a particular project’s success. Thus, art was explicitly drawn into key business considerations, i.e., a much more active dimension than, for instance, merely seeing art as an investment (Lorange, 2023).
Three business development projects were briefly analyzed, applying the 10 quality control tests from the author’s art collection. One was clearly unrealistic, with two art-based quality control factors seeming to signal why, in particular. However, another project seemed to have been successful, also verified by two of the art-based test criteria. Finally, one was clearly a failure, “signaled” by two other art-derived test criteria. It can be concluded that art can indeed play a much more central role in managerial business activities than has been generally assumed until now. See also UBS (2023), which indicates that the bulk of art collecting is primarily carried out for investment purposes, a more passive approach than the author’s.
