NESTA PROJECT: FINE ARTSITS AND INNOVATION

Executive Summary
This Working Paper is the first publication of a nine-month
study into the working lives of fine arts graduates and the
ways in which they contribute to innovation, both within the
arts and in the wider economy.
The study itself consists of a literature review, which is
included in this paper, a questionnaire survey, and a number
of face-to-face biographical interviews. The full report will be
published later this year.
The literature review is necessarily wide-ranging, covering
detailed work on artists’ working lives, studies of the wider
cultural and creative industries, and the literature on
innovation.
The starting point for the literature review is the broad and by
now familiar argument that, in a knowledge-based economy,
innovation is increasingly responsible for economic growth
and moreover, that the type of innovation advanced
economies require demands what are sometimes called
‘creative’ skills.
It can reasonably be argued that these creative skills are
highly developed in fine arts graduates (though they are by
no means exclusive to this group of people) and moreover
there has been a large increase in the number of people
studying fine arts in the UK in recent decades. By exploring
their working lives we hope to shed some light on the ways
that fine arts graduates are absorbed into the economy, the
transferability of their skills and the mechanisms by which
their creativity contributes to innovation.
Aside from the general increase in numbers in higher
education, there are three primary hypotheses that may
account for why the economy is absorbing higher numbers
of fine arts graduates:
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