GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

12
14 Haseman & Jaaniste
(2008), cf Jaaniste (2009b)
15 Cutler and Co & CIRAC
(2003)
16 PMSIEC (2005)
17 Australia Council for the
Arts (2006)
18 www.cci.edu.au
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study
are often involved in innovation, well
beyond scientific knowledge and
technological wizardy.
An increase in attention on the service
sector, as it rapidly replaces the
manufacturing base. With manufacturing
now moving offshore into the developing
world, service sector innovation has
become a more crucial part of innovationbased
economies, which includes arts and
cultural services.
A growing acknowledgement of the
triple-bottom-line of economic, social
and environmental value. As such,
innovation thinking has reached beyond
commerce and industry, into public sector
and ‘third sector’ non-profit organisations,
where we often find arts and culture.
A focus on the ‘culture of innovation’.
Business management texts highlight
the need for a supportive organisational
culture that breeds creativity and
innovation, and although this is not an
arts-based approach, such concerns do
bring culture into the conversation.
In the HASS sector (the humanities, arts
and social sciences), arts and cultural policy
has been connected to the creativity and
innovation agenda mostly in terms of
cultural expression and distribution. In this
context, creativity tends to refer to the
expressivity and meaning-making at the
heart of arts and cultural production—the
making, performing and presenting of music,
performance, artworks, aesthetic design,
literature and the like—whilst innovation
tends to be used to refer to new and
experimental forms of cultural expression, or
new ways of distributing and managing such
cultural activities.
On several fronts, though, the arts and
cultural sector have moved into dialogue
with industry and innovation policy and
its science and technology driven notions
of creativity and innovation. This can be
seen in:
The rise of creative industries discourse.
This field has sought to show how
business enterprise and innovation in the
cultural domain can also act as enablers
of innovation across other parts of the
economy and society.
The entrance of creative production
into academic research. Known in the
arts, design and media disciplines as
‘practice-led research’, creative production
has been shown to be a valid research
activity alongside science and humanities
scholarship.
Fusion of arts-science and artstechnology,
and new media hybrids.
These have provided striking evidence of
how cultural pursuits can impact and be
impacted upon by innovations in science
and technology.
Various research and policy projects on
innovation and the arts/cultural/creative
industries. As these have emerged, they
have at times functioned as policy bridges
by various sector advocates and agencies.
The journey taken by arts and cultural
domains towards innovation policy in Australia
has been charted by Haseman and Jaaniste
in The arts and Australia’s national innovation
system 1994-2008. 14 They canvas the range
of arguments made during this time: cultural
and educational arguments about the way
the arts can support a role for developing,
encouraging and attracting innovators;
knowledge and application arguments about
the way the arts and creative industries can
generate and apply innovative ideas; and
commercial and systems arguments about
the scale, significance and systemic roles of
the arts and creative industries as an enabler
of innovation in contemporary societies.
In Australia, there were several key
milestones in the attempt to connect arts
with innovation policy. During the latter
stages of the Howard government, these
included: the Creative Industries Cluster
Study with its innovation systems report
(2003), 15 the Imagine Australia report to
the Prime Minister’s Science, Innovation and
Engineering Council (2005), 16 the Creative
innovation strategy of the Australia Council
for the Arts (2006), 17 and the establishment
of the Australian Research Council’s Centre
of Excellence for Creative Industries and
Innovation (CCI, launched 2005). 18
The announcement that Terry Cutler
would head the Australia’s Review of the
National Innovation System (RNIS) in 2008
was also significant, for Cutler had worked
equally with science and technologists,