We are deeply saddened at the death of Sydney a key part of the ethos of ICCE and an extraordinary friend, supporter, and champion of so many creatives and social innovators.

Sydney was a founding member of the ICCE Advisory Board, always offering his time with typical generosity, his only demand that we think better and with ambition for our students and the creative and social sectors. Sydney often referred to himself as the “Babel-fish” accountant – able to translate financial information into ways that others understood, he definitely did that, and  many of our students and  alumni changed their view on “numbers” because of him; more than that he works as a babel-fish for creativity and  its importance – championing it to others at policy and industry level and  even more he was keen to ensure that the insights from our research were heard and  understood in all of the sectors he could reach.

Sydney became a key part of the fundraising working group to support the CCA at Goldsmiths, opening his network and creative thinking to support that successful campaign.

He was selected to become an Industry Champion for Nesta’s Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, and it was that role that led him to becoming a Research Fellow in ICCE. Keen to underpin his instinct about the potential of the creative industries with practice and other research and to create new frameworks for the potential for ICCE to reach new audiences. Sadly, he became too unwell to continue with this work.

One of his daughters – Sophie – is an alumnus from the MA Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (Leadership pathway) programme, Sydney was overjoyed to be at her graduation.

Sydney would be seen at almost every Design and Art degree show in London – he told Siân that he could always tell a Goldsmiths graduate from any discipline because “they have a curiosity and ability to question that I don’t see in alumni from other institutions”. Sydney had curiosity, generosity, confidence in others’ abilities and boundless ambition for ICCE, Goldsmiths and the sectors and individuals he championed.

We miss him and take his values in life forward in all we do.

By ICCE Team

Introduction

In the first two weeks of April I was commissioned to run a Participatory Video and Most Significant Change (PVMSC) workshop in my role as Senior Associate at InsightShare participatory video and community development company, in partnership with Opportunity International UK and local partners in Iganga, Eastern Uganda. This workshop forms an element of the midline evaluation for the Mainstreaming Disability Inclusion in the Ugandan Financial Services Sector. The activity aimed to generate information from the stakeholders’ perspective, particularly to ensure that participants record the transformational journeys that individuals and groups living with disabilities go on to become financially included and economically active within their communities. The activities are designed also to help to raise awareness on key related programmatic issues, build skills in trainee staff and village agents and encourage involvement in learning activities.

What is Participatory Video?

Participatory Video (PV) is a set of techniques to involve a group or community in shaping and creating their own film.  The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories. This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to see improvements and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise people – helping them implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.

Participatory Video and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)

We use PV to complement and enhance other data collection methods that Opportunity International UK and partners are using as part of their M&E systems.  PV gathers qualitative data that often escapes traditional M&E tools.

It is not always easy to gauge and communicate people’s lived experiences and situations in relation to an issue. Those best positioned to explore and convey these messages are the beneficiaries themselves – they can speak first-hand about it. They can select relevant individuals to interview in their communities and decide how to represent themselves. As footage is collected through time and various spaces, all actors can reflect back in the community through screenings, where stakeholders are brought together to reflect and discuss.

Our approach helps beneficiaries and stakeholders tell their stories and communicate their perspectives in an accessible, compelling and versatile format through a participatory and authentic process. Following stringent informed consent procedures, these stories can then be used to communicate lessons or new ideas across to new groups, other organisations or decision makers.

The PV MSC Facilitator Training Team

As lead facilitator, I worked with Scolastica Kukutia, who is a Maasai activist working on women’s rights, land rights and preservation of culture in Kenya.  I have known her since 2017, when she joined a delegation of Maasai leaders at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford at our Living Cultures: Decolonising Cultural Spaces Project, where she worked with curators to realign the narratives behind objects from her community at the museum … but that is another blog!  Scola trained with us in PV techniques and was part of our first Living Cultures Indigenous Fellowship programme, which was piloted last year. She is now a lead facilitator and mentor in Kenya for the second phase of that programme, which starts next week (I’m facilitating that remotely – but that’s another blog too!). Having Scola in the team was a dream and she was also able to add the MSC technique to her portfolio.

What we did

During the first three days, we ran an intensive workshop to train a local evaluation team made up of twelve staff, partner representatives and community members of Opportunity Bank, the local delivery partner in Uganda.  This included simple video making techniques, storytelling techniques and the evaluation method featuring the ‘most significant change’ question that forms the centre of finding stories of change from participants.

Then three days at three villages, where we supported two teams of 6 evaluators and 10 participants to find, share and film their stories.  The local participants selected the story of change to film, then participated in creating drama sequences to act as illustrative footage to the testimony given by the main storyteller, as a direct address to camera.

Back to base on day four to document the 60 written stories we collected, train the team to edit using simple iMovie software (bearing in mind that about half of the evaluators had never used a computer before!).  By day 10 we had created six stories, subtitled into English.

The final element was to support the team to run a community screening and discussion, where an audience of more than 60 local people comprising the participants, community leaders and other stakeholders viewed the films and then discussed the stories of change to contribute to a participatory analysis, to assess the barriers, enablers and changes presented by each story.

What’s next?

Back from Uganda, we’re now carrying out a final ‘polish’ of the films and writing a project report for wider dissemination.  In September, we return to a different region of Uganda to do the end point evaluation ‘as well as running a second PVMSC process with a project with refugees.

It’s hard work, with no breaks for the entire time in the field, but as a method of collecting evaluation data, it’s so rewarding to work over time with people to give them the tools and the space to tell their own stories in the ways in which they want to tell and share them. It’s also lots of fun.

by Tricia Jenkins

Part-time lecturer, MA AACP, ICCE

11^th May 2022

We at InsightShare hope to offer training in PV for research and PV MSC specifically for academics in the not too distant future.  Please get in touch if you might be interested.

Please join us for Cultural Leadership Exchange Initiative Webinar #4 – Entrepreneurialism and the Creative Industries – what next? This the last of four webinars presented as part of a unique collaboration between Goldsmiths and the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, NIDA.

Innovative and sustainable approaches to business, financial models, leadership and management in the creative economy are essential as we transition through a fundamentally changing ecology.

How will creative training institutions develop the entrepreneurial skills and competencies of cultural leaders and entrepreneurs to successfully instigate, manage and collaborate on creative projects and businesses in their own practice now and for the future

Presentations, dialogue and a Q&A with Gavin Robins, Head of Movement, Senior Lecturer, NIDA; Jessica Bowles BA, Principal Lecturer, Course Leader MA/MFA Creative Producing, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London and Peter White, Head, First Nations Cultural Engagement at Sydney Living Museums (Historic Houses Trust of NSW).

Email Nicola.Turner@gold.ac.uk to register and to be sent the Zoom link for the Webinar.

📍Zoom
Tuesday 26th April
9-10.30am (UK)
6-7.30pm (AEST)

#UKAUSeason #culturalleadershipexchange #Entrepreneurship

The Cultural Leadership Exchange Initiative is envisioning the enterprise and entrepreneurial competencies needed for professional and entrepreneurial cultural leaders and entrepreneurs for the future – an online dialogue between UK and Australian thought leaders. Curated by Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom and the National Institute of the Dramatic Arts, Sydney, Australia the Initiative is supported by the British Council through the UK/Australia Season Program 2021-2022, Who Are We Now and supported by Goldsmiths and NIDA.

As part of the collaboration between Goldsmiths and NIDA, four public facing webinars, taking place within a wider institutional/educational dialogue exploring the student/academic/institutional/political context for collaboration through four online conversations between Goldsmiths and NIDA staff. Following the webinars, a framework for ongoing, shared (Australia/UK) collaborative connectivity and learning around leadership and entrepreneurship will be prepared in April/May 2022.

Information about the UK Australia Season can be found here: https://ukaustraliaseason.com

Michael Hitchcock delivered a zoom presentation on gastronomy as a creative industry for the postgraduate doctoral programme at Udayana University in Bali, Indonesia.  Michael’s links to this university go back to 1980 as his doctoral research in eastern Indonesia was sponsored by Professor I Gusti Ngurah Bagus of Udayana University. The presentation was well attended and was followed by lively question and answer session. The details can be seen on:

https://s3kajianbudaya.unud.ac.id/posts/profesor-michael-hitchcock-dari-university-of-london-memberikan-kuliah-umum-di-prodi-doktor-kajian-budaya-universitas-udayana

Michael Hitchcock wrote the opening chapter to this book edited by the late Joope Ave. The volume illustrated the possibility of using traditional crafts such as batik to enhance the dining experience.

In 2019 the Museums + AI Network, led by Dr Oonagh Murphy, Lecturer in Arts Management, engaged with 50 senior museum professionals, and leading academics across the UK and US to develop new insights into AI in a museum context.

Alongside industry focussed events Dr Murphy ran a series of events called Curator: Computer: Creator that encouraged diverse voices to join the conversation on what AI might look like for museums in the near future in partnership with the Barbican Centre (London), and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (NYC). 

During these workshops and events, she worked with a network of museum professionals to test, challenge and refine models of practice, workshop formats, and development tools – this work led to the development of AI: A Museum Planning Toolkit which was first published in 2020. With Case studies from American Museum of Natural History, National Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The English language version of the toolkit has been downloaded 4,000+ times, with print copies distributed to policy makers in the UK and USA. The Library of Congress stated that they sought to ‘mirror’ the strategic model outlined in the toolkit, in their Machine Learning strategy. The research has been presented to the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education who are seeking to develop policy around AI within the Creative and Cultural Industries.  

As a result of the impact that this work has had on the sector Dr Murphy was commissioned alongside international research collaborator Dr Elena Villaespesa, Pratt Institute to help the region of Baden-Baden (Germany) to develop an AI working group. Thanks to this partnership and ongoing advisory work associated with this research the Toolkit has now been published in German and Spanish. The 2022 versions of the toolkit feature new case studies from The Prado Museum, ZKM, Ludwig Forum Aachen, and Das Badische Landesmuseum and are open access and free to download.  

In her role as Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University Dr Murphy will share her latest research at the AI & Cultural Heritage Forum on the 28th March. This online event is free to attend and can be booked now. 

The first World Conference on Creative Economy (WCCE), an Indonesian government initiative, was held in that country in 2018, promoted as a “forum for policymakers and industry players to exchange ideas, resolve challenges and identify opportunities within the creative economy.”  It attracted much interest in the cultural and creative industries’ policy community as an indicator of the enthusiasm with which certain countries in the Global South were beginning, pre-pandemic, to take a lead in taking forward the global creative economy agenda.

The second iteration of the WCCE took place, one year behind schedule, from 3rd-5th December 2021 in the new Dubai Conference Centre, delayed by Covid, like the huge, 438-hectare Dubai (World) Expo 2020 next door, situated on the border between Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  The event was lavishly funded, hybrid and audio-visually spectacular – an impressive blend of state-of-the-art production values and impregnable, Covid-mandated security procedures.  (All Dubai’s public museums were closed at the time).

It was remarkable that the event happened at all, but WCCE 2021 was not without its challenges. A stellar international list of speakers (including UNESCO Secretary-General Audrey Azoulay, architect Santiago Calatrava, authors John Howkins and Malcolm Gladwell, and John Newbigin from the UK’s International Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) and ICCE, competed for attention on three juxtaposed sound stages with a roster of princely ministers, big screen cultural heritage presentations and, at times, each other: some distinguished speakers were left with very small in-person audiences as the physically-distanced attendees migrated around the cavernous arena.  Because we had all been locked up for so long, the experience was nonetheless exhilarating, although it also felt at times more like an extension of the sensation-busting, adjacent Expo extravaganza, than a policy symposium. It, too, was a showcase of (Emirati) talent.

The event was ‘topped and tailed’ by Noura Bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, the UAE’s inspirational Minister of Culture and Youth, who does more than anyone to redeem the governance of what can reasonably be described as a benevolent autocracy, always rises sublimely to the occasion and, unusually for this part of the world, never forgets to thank her staff. The UAE, it is instructive to note, has also done more than most countries to monitor and respond to the brutal impact of the pandemic on cultural freelancers.

Participants came away from Dubai with a definite sense of the show being back on the road, but what road?  Is the ‘creative economy’, some two decades after its popularisation by John Howkins in his book The Creative Economy,[1] still conceptually valid?  How successfully has it weathered the successive critiques of sociologists, economic geographers and business economists?  How is it adapting and responding to the twin challenges of climate change and widening social inequalities?

These questions were indeed on the table in Dubai in the form of some now familiar rhetorical tropes (“Future Sustainable”; “Inclusion and Diversity”; “Education Unleashed”; “Reworking Work”; “Technology Transformation”; and, less self-evident, “Elevating the Media and Communications Landscape”.)  The global appetite to explore these themes and capitalise on their potential to diversify economies and provide jobs, is undiminished. What was invented (largely) in the UK, is now being gripped and taken forward by others, not least Indonesia, to where the next WCCE event is planned to return late in 2022.

Perhaps, as one of John Newbigin’s interlocutors (from the West Midlands) cited by John on stage in Dubai, suggests, the ‘creative economy’ is actually a state of mind rather than a coherent construct of public policy. This will not satisfy the policy wonks, I suspect, still keen, as many of us are, to nail down something more economically concrete and more amenable to influence via the panoply of fiscal and other levers available to politicians and policy-makers.

From this perspective, one key challenge is to observe, codify and make sense of the many examples of divergent approaches to creative economy policy development visible around the globe.  Two examples will suffice to make the point – two small countries, both mountainous, both with young populations, both largely devoid of natural resources and both with histories of imperial subjugation – Slovenia and Kyrgyzstan, both of which I visited and studied in 2021.

Slovenia is pursuing a largely design-led, publicly funded approach to creative development financed from two offices in Ljubljana and Maribor by the European Union to the tune of some 20m euros over a five year period, and managed by a dedicated Centre for Creativity. Small venture capital-type funding is available to start-ups on a competitive basis and some 100 companies have benefited to date. The presiding spirit is one of public-private partnership.[2]

Development in Kyrgyzstan, by contrast, is entirely private sector led and is driven by the rapid growth of creative co-working spaces (in Bishkek, Osh and Issyk-kul) managed by the Ololo Group. This is a property development model with a creative twist, but it is this highly inventive “twist”, combined with exceptional entrepreneurial vision, that drives both sector profile and growth. The agencies of government are generally mistrusted so public-private partnerships are not a feature of this landscape.

The two models could hardly be more different, but are equally valid in context.  However from a policy perspective many questions arise from even the most cursory examination. A few of the most obvious are these:

• What are the main policy objectives? Jobs created? Regional market share of cultural goods and services created? Other?
• What is the role of the state and of the market in stimulating growth? Where should primary departmental responsibility lie, and boundaries be acknowledged, including the boundaries between national and local government (city mayors)?
• How best to provide financial assistance and /or incentives to new businesses, often within the context of increased pressure on national budgets? Loans, grants, equity participation?
• How to reinvent state cultural organisations (eg museums and theatres) so that they operate more entrepreneurially and make their assets more widely available for public consumption?
• Competition and regulation: how to protect creative IP and ensure the growth of competitive markets?

The list goes on and on, but none of these questions were discussed in Dubai.  I suspect, however, that they are well understood in the UAE Ministry of Culture and Youth.

Finally, note that Dubai has its own well calibrated Creative Economy Strategy which aims to “double the contribution of the creative industries to the GDP of Dubai from 2.6 per cent in 2020 to 5 per cent by 2025.” Few would bet on this target not being achieved, pandemic or no pandemic, given the scale of the ambition on display in December 2021.

[1] John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas, Penguin, 2002, updated 2007 and 2013.

[2] Centre for Creativity – Culture of Slovenia

Written by: Dr Martin Smith, Visiting Fellow in Creative Industries

The newly elected ENCATC board of directors met online on 30 November 2021. On this occasion, the newly elected Board members have defined their functions for the next two years.

Gerald Lidstone, Director of the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, representing Goldsmiths, University of London in the United Kingdom, a full member of ENCATC, has been elected as ENCATC President.

As ENCATC President, Gerald is elected with the specific mandate of:

• To chair the meetings of the General Assembly and the Board and set out the agenda together with the Secretary General;
• To ensure, together with the Secretary General, the representation of ENCATC at external meetings and events;
• To contribute and supervise the activities of the Secretary General;
• To take part in formulating and regularly reviewing the strategic aims and the business plans of the association;
• To ensure, together with the other Board Members, that the policies and practices of the association are in keeping with its purpose;
• To ensure, together with the other Board Members, the association’s functions within the Belgian legal framework.

Richard Maloney from New York University in the United States and Dea Vidović from the Kultura Nova Foundation in Croatia were elected as Vice-Presidents. Michal Lázňovský from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Theatre Faculty in the Czech Republic will serve as Treasurer and Elena Borin from Link Campus University – Rome in Italy as Secretary. Leticia Labaronne from ZHAW School of Management and Law Center for Arts Management in Switzerland and Violeta Simjanovska from Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki in Finland are also serving on the board.

Entrusted by the ENCATC membership, the ENCATC Board for the 2021-2023 period will be furthering the network’s efforts to advocate for excellence in cultural management and cultural policy education and research, professionalise the cultural sector to make it sustainable, and provide the academic, research and professional communities a unique platform for discussion and exchange at the European and international level.

Online Symposium on Trade Secrets for Scholars and Practitioners

Thursday 24^th and Friday 25^th February 2022

Objective of Symposium

This 2-day symposium intends to create a space for policymakers, academics, PhD students and practicing lawyers to listen to key-note speakers and discuss topics on cybersecurity, trade secret theft, technology, policy and innovation.

Criteria for papers

We welcome papers from PhD students or post-docs within four years of completing their PhD.

Talks and discussions will be loosely based on:

• Law and policy surrounding trade secrets – cybersecurity, trade secret theft, innovation.
• Economics and Management of trade secrets – innovation, policy and firm strategies.

We welcome applicants from a range of disciplines – law, policy, economics, management, sociology – to submit and present original research for 10-15 minutes based on the mentioned topics. Interdisciplinary approaches towards the topics are encouraged.

For successful submissions, we hope this symposium will help contribute to your paper’s development, provide a chance to speak to experts in the field, and receive feedback during the workshop.

Papers will be selected on originality and scholarly merit.

Submissions

All submissions can be in the form of either a draft paper or extended abstract (800 words).

Submission deadline: 21st January 2022

Notification of successful submissions: 4th February 2022

To submit your abstract or paper please email a pdf file with your name, student status and contact information to Anna at astew010@gold.ac.uk.

We look forward to your submission!

Curated by

Dr Nicola Searle

EPSRC Digital Economy Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Cultural & Creative Entrepreneurship (ICCE), Goldsmiths, University of London.

Funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grant EP/P005039/1.