Opening up innovation: a case for collaboration in the cultural sector

At a societal level, we have long held shortsighted beliefs of where innovation comes from. Ideas of the individual genius, the “great man”, the messianic visionary, are pervasive. Hero leadership appears time and again in our stories, our films, our art. It is so intoxicating it affects how we have shaped our organisations and the ways we work. But good ideas are broadly distributed in society. In order to take advantage of this, fundraisers are some of the first to recognise the value that openness and collaboration brings.

Open innovation

Darren Henley, CEO of Arts Council England, recognised the need for change when he wrote that “businesses need to innovate how they achieve innovations”.

Up until the turn of the millennium there was practically only one route we knew of for achieving innovation. Proprietary models dictated an organisation should invest in its own R&D processes, manifest and incubate ideas, then develop them internally before testing them on an unwitting public. The only engagement with the external environment was when products entered the market. This model is easy to manage but overly reliant on a narrow pool of internal talent, which can soon become top heavy. What’s more, such closed models of innovation are arguably unsuited to contemporary contexts that recognise finite resources, rising levels of inequality and a fragmented funding landscape.

This prevailing view of innovation was disrupted 25 years ago when Henry Chesbrough coined a new paradigm: “open innovation”. Chesbrough recognised innovation was often not the result of a closed pipeline model but the fruit borrowed from a complex ecosystem connecting different people and organisations. Open innovation encourages organisations to make their walls as permeable as possible, and to allow the free flow of ideas, skills and resources. Crucially, the process of sharing should both be inside-out and outside-in across business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationships.

Image credit: https://www.viima.com/blog/open-innovation

Good examples of open innovation mechanisms being applied to the cultural sector can be found in the Creative People and Places (CPP) programme. Mark Robinson’s 10-year review highlighted the greatest contribution CPP projects have made is “to multiply leadership within the community and systems active in places rich with people and ideas. They have done this by building trust, being open and positive, and sharing control.”

I spent six years as Creative Producer at a CPP project where decentralised decision making sat at the heart of our innovation strategy. Reaching beyond our organisational boundaries to exchange with external collaborators supported fundraising efforts through pecuniary and non-pecuniary exchanges such as asset-based community development, codesigning new products, and identifying new audiences, routes to market and investment streams.

While the open innovation model generates multiple innovation trajectories, this can also give rise to structural risk. One way for fundraisers to mitigate this is through enhanced stakeholder engagement. Put simply, this means engaging the right people in the right way to manage exchanges and reconcile risks of overexploitation. It is probably no coincidence stakeholder engagement and open innovation were first coined at a similar time.

The fundraiser as an innovator

In an innovation model built on openness, collaboration and stakeholder engagement, the role of the fundraiser becomes even more integral and dynamic. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge and resources between internal and external stakeholders, fundraisers can act as central nodes in an innovation ecosystem that prioritises creativity, inclusion and collaboration. It is important fundraisers recognise their responsibility for not just implementing core delivery functions but also driving innovation.

Depending on the level of influence we have over our organisation, a purist open innovation model may not always be achievable. But borrowing from the model and baking in openness and collaboration to our business strategy can have a transformative effect on the leadership, accessibility, ambition and quality of our creative programming. I’ve included a handful of resources below that I have found especially useful in advancing the role of openness and collaboration in innovation processes.

Resources:

• The UK Government Communication Service have published CPD guidance for Ensuring Effective Stakeholder Engagement: https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/publications/ensuring-effective-stakeholder-engagement/
• LPIP Hub’s “Cultural Recovery” strand provides support and guidance to local partnerships looking to include considerations of arts and culture sufficiently, and effectively, into their place-based agenda: https://lpiphub.bham.ac.uk/cultural-recovery/
• Creative People and Places have compiled a library of resources to support best practice in engaging communities, approaches to consortium working and new leadership models that enhance collaboration at every level: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/creative-people-and-places-0
• Deliberative democratic decision-making is becoming more of a policy focus. You may live near and be able to take advantage of the new ‘Neighbourhood Boards’ being established to decide how £1.5billion is spent through the Plans for Neighbourhoods prospectus: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/plan-for-neighbourhoods-prospectus-and-tools
• Alternatively, you could build and implement your own methods of representative public participation. Citizen Assemblies have been trialled in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, New Art Exchange and Battersea Arts Centre. Head to https://www.involve.org.uk/ for tonnes of great resources or Democracy Next’s ‘Assembling an Assembly’ guide: https://assemblyguide.demnext.org/
• For those in the public sector, IPEC have produced guidance on engaging with partners through external procurement. It demystifies what is policy and what is law and how pre-market engagement can curate the innovation ecosystem you are a part of: https://www.ipec.org.uk/demystifying-procurement/