The primary function of an R&D (research and development) unit in a business company is to develop new products which are profitable and could be well accepted by the future buyers. The key responsibilities of the R&D team are to make sure that the new product is developed and produced on time, efficiently, within the available budget, under all regulatory requirements, at the requested quality level. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD defines Research and Development as “creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications. R&D is a term covering three activities: basic research, applied research, and experimental development.” (OECD Factbook 2008).
R&D is essential for increasing of productivity, and it plays an important role in any innovation processes, as it results in the technology that brings new products and services to the market. In general, innovations result in high quality jobs, successful businesses, better goods and services and more efficient processes. We rarely talk about innovations in culture on an organisational level. Strategies directed to innovation could help a lot in finding the best way to perform, operate, deliver, or communicate. The emphasis in innovation strategies in culture is not necessarily on productivity, or a new technology (therefore not applicable only to creative industries), but could cover all aspects of an organisation’s development. Here are few examples of possible innovation strategies in culture:
o Product innovation – implementation of new products, new characteristics of existing artistic products, or modification of a cultural product in an innovative way.
o Innovation in the process – all cases where there are innovative changes throughout the internal processes and operations within a cultural organisation.
o Innovation in the resources structure – for example application of new fundraising strategies; innovative way of combining the team of artists; using of new technologies in a stage production, using of alternative and non-conventional spaces for presenting the programs or selling the products.
o Marketing innovation – implementation of innovative marketing tools for audience development, image building, broad public access, etc.
Strategies and tools for innovation are more popular among cultural organisations operating in a flexible style. Non-profit artistic organisations and arts businesses are much more open to apply innovation in all aspects than the state cultural organisations.
Some large organisations in the field of arts and culture have in their organisational structure R&D departments (or activities related to R&D). Majority of them are profit-oriented (but not only) – e.g. big festival centers, large music distribution chains, performing arts venues, museums of arts, university libraries, etc. Small and middle-size cultural organisations, and the non-profit one, do not deal much with R&D. The reasons for this could be:
- R&D creates a “competitive advantage”, a new potential for an organisation to conquer a market, to increase sales and profit. In most of the cases, these are not primary objectives of a cultural organisation.
- R&D requires substantial investments and majority of cultural organisations operate in a scarcity of funding and a constant struggle for fundraising from outside sources. Finding additional funds for research and development is extremely difficult when the basic budget could not be easily balanced.
- R&D is an activity with a high level of risk. The risk investment is returned at a later stage in case the innovation is successful. Cultural processes contain anyway a high percentage of risk and uncertainty anyway, as of the economic nature of these organisations and the inability to fully predict the success (or failure) of the final cultural product.
- There could be bureaucratic obstacles and barriers to implement R&D, predetermined by legislative acts or internal organisational regulation.
Innovative thinking sometimes does not need huge investments-it needs open minds, non-conventional approaches, a brilliant idea, and a lot of imagination and creativity. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra is one of the many recent examples of innovative thinking which brings an excellent collaborative online projects. In the era of the new technology and online tools, the R&D in culture is connected much with the way of using social networking platforms and other online collaborative tools for implementing our innovative ideas in a cheap and effective way.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
