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

Manifesto for a Creative
Britain (2008), photograph
by Andy Aitchison.
Photo courtesy of Tate
Modern, London.
150 Bakhshi and Throsby
(2009:3)
151 Bakhshi and Throsby
(2009:2)
152 Bakhshi and Throsby
(2009:5)
153 Oakley (2007: 31-35)
Notably, the study of innovation as it
relates to contemporary art institutions has
had little analysis and reporting, but this is
starting to change. One of the few studies
addressing this topic directly is the NESTA
report by Bakhshi and Throsby, entitled
Innovation in arts and cultural organisations
(2009). It acknowledges that, “recent studies
say next to nothing about innovation types
and processes as they relate to publicly
supported arts and cultural institutions.” 150
Their literature review points out a key
difficulty in entering this under-reported field:
The concept of innovation itself is not
at all clearly defined when applied to
organisations in the arts. Little is known
about the various ways in which these
institutions engage with, adopt, utilise and
contribute to processes of innovation. This
is partly because of a lack of a systematic
understanding of how innovation relates to
the functions of such cultural enterprises,
and partly because of a lack of an
established methodology for quantitative
analysis of innovation processes in the
cultural sector.
This gap in knowledge about innovation
in arts and cultural institutions creates
the potential for serious confusion, as
arts funders call on organisations they are
supporting to be more ‘innovative’ in their
work without being explicit about what
they mean by ‘innovation’. 151
For Bakhski and Throsby, creating better ways
to track the innovation-based activities of
cultural institutions is in itself an important
area of innovation. They hope to see cultural
institutions “searching for new ways to
measure the economic and cultural value they
create for audiences and their wider group
of stakeholders, and to translate these into
terms that policymakers, funding agencies
and private investors can relate to.” 152
3.3 A question of evidence
While asserting the links between
contemporary arts programs and educating
for innovation is ripe for exploration,
problems of evaluating and appraising are
ongoing for researchers. As Sections 1 &
2 of this report have already emphasised,
identifying and measuring innovation itself
remains difficult. Additionally, research within
arts education can encounter problems of
reliability, with controversy over appropriate
and valid methods of evaluation. Oakley has
précised many of these concerns, which
suggest that scholarship is not always
providing ‘robust empirical data’. 153 She
states, for example, that the replication of
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 35