New Research Processes and Business Models for the Creative Industries

The UK is world-renowned for its creative industries in areas as diverse as music, animation, and the performing and visual arts. However, the emergence of a new generation of social, pervasive and affective ICT promises to transform the creative landscape, raising major new challenges for both the creative industries and ICT research. This cluster therefore seeks to answer two closely related questions: what key challenges face the creative industries due to the emergence of a new generation of social, pervasive and affective ICT? and conversely, what long term challenges must be tackled by ICT research in order to support future creative industries?In answering these questions we also recognise that the creative industries have a distinctive character that challenges traditional models of research and business innovation. Specifically, the creative industries revolve around dynamic and often unorthodox coalitions, whereby numerous small and micro-businesses come together for the duration of a single project, then disband and form new partnerships for the next project. Unlike larger companies, it can be extremely challenging to engage such dynamic creative networks in traditional long-term term EPSRC-funded research projects. Our cluster therefore also addresses a third question: how can we better engage small creative companies in research and knowledge transfer, and especially how can we establish new interdisciplinary approaches across ICT, the arts and humanities and the social sciences that support 'practice-led' approaches to research?In order to tackle these questions, our cluster brings together practitioners from the creative industries with researchers from varied traditions that span ICT, the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and business studies. Together these partners will engage in a year-long programme of activities that include:- a series of workshops (open events, ateliers and sandpits) to build new a community of researchers and users, explore research agendas and processes, and generate seed proposals. At the time of writing, our community stands at twenty-one partners and we expect this to increase considerably over the year.- four practice projects that will explore new ways of working by engaging in and studying focused short-term practical activities addressing different sectors of the creative industries including music, pervasive media and animation;- two troubadour studies that reflect on different approaches to research and knowledge transfer across a wide range of past and ongoing projects; - funding a focused team of researchers to distil the results of these activities into a research framework for the creative industries that combines a forward-looking research agenda with guidelines for new models of collaboration.The outputs of these activities will be: the formation of a new interdisciplinary community of researchers and creative users that is ready to undertake future research projects; a set of seed proposals ready to be developed into full-blown proposals for EPSRC, TSB and other research funders as part the Digital Economy programme; and a coherent agenda for long-term ICT research in the creative industries.