Innovationlabs
What can we do to make the cultural and creative sector more agile and resilient in the long term? That is the question that makers, cultural institutions and other creative parties tackled in the Innovationlabs programme. During two editions, innovative ideas were investigated, tested and improved.
Innovating is a process of trying out, adjusting and learning. Not every project delivers immediate visible success, but it is the challenges and uncertainties that contribute to new insights and opportunities for your practice or organisation. They help you become more flexible and adaptive. That is what agility and resilience are all about.
This is exactly the kind of knowledge needed to make the cultural and creative sector more agile and resilient as well. By sharing insights and experiences widely, makers, cultural institutions and creative agencies can learn from each other and strengthen each other. That is why the Innovationlabs programme focused on knowledge sharing, although this did not always prove easy in practice.
Daily reality forces many organisations to focus on the short term, partly due to a subsidy system that mainly supports short-term projects. How can we break this pattern? During the implementation of Innovationlabs, insights were gained and bundled into five recommendations. These are intended as building blocks for a long-term vision on the cultural and creative sector and are aimed at policymakers and financiers.
recommendations
Investing in the future requires trust, because the path to a dot on the horizon is uncertain. So, when assessing and guiding projects, place more emphasis on the process or method and less on the end product. When funding, shift the focus from a concrete or specific outcome to the impact you want to achieve. In the Innovationlabs programme, projects were given experimental space to work on a task in the sector with a significant amount of money. Projects were assessed during the selection procedure on the innovation process and intended impact, rather than a guaranteed outcome.
By building on insights from different social domains, new knowledge for innovation is generated. Designers are adept at doing this step by step: the design approach. This involves methods for engaging different perspectives, harnessing the power of imagination and testing innovations in practice. Innovationlabs was an intersection of knowledge and perspectives as different domains came together: art, culture and the creative industries, but also science and education. For instance, five lector-led research groups conducted joint research into the projects’ innovation processes. This cross-domain format encouraged participants to continually question their projects and comprehend issues from different points of view.
The current subsidy system encourages individual positioning, so makers, institutions and creative agencies are competitors rather than partners. That is a pity, because new resilience in the sector actually requires collaboration and the pooling of knowledge, experience and insights, including across national borders. By sharing more knowledge, the sector can respond better to current and future challenges. The Innovationlabs programme explored an approach to funding and support, with knowledge sharing at its core. This meant that activities were organised and financed that not only promoted knowledge sharing, but also contributed to a wider application of the results of the 33 innovation projects.
A new generation of makers moves freely between networks and disciplines, alternately using various media, forms and styles. More and more cultural institutions are also operating outside traditional frameworks. Museums and theatres, for example, are experimenting with new ways of producing and presenting art and culture, aimed at a broader audience reach. This reveals new perspectives and generates surprising connections that stimulate innovation. A subsidy system that holds on to narrow definitions of disciplines hampers this development. It is time to design funding and policy so that the focus is not on the discipline, but on the innovative power of the sector.
In the creative and cultural sector, it is common to work from project to project or term to term. A future-proof sector requires a more strategic approach, focusing instead on the longer term and continued development. By better equipping makers and culture professionals with skills for the long term, including recognising and setting up opportunities for value creation, impact and funding, the sector can better anticipate future developments. Strategic development programmes, such as Innovationlabs’ knowledge & community programme, contribute to the learning capacity of the sector and help to focus more on agility and resilience.
33 innovation projects
The Creative Industries Fund NL was a key implementing partner of the Innovationlabs programme, a Ministry of Education, Culture and Science initiative. On behalf of all the national culture funds and in collaboration with CLICKNL, the Fund issued the Open Call Innovationlabs twice, in 2021 and 2022. This call was open to innovative and experimental projects to address current challenges in the cultural and creative sector and increase the resilience of the sector. Many makers, cultural institutions and other creative parties responded. From all their ideas, 16 projects were selected in the first edition, and 17 in the second.
research
To encourage knowledge development for the cultural and creative sector, CLICKNL initiated a study into the 33 Innovationlabs projects. Regieorgaan SIA, financier of practice-based research, commissioned five lector-led research groups from various universities of applied sciences and art academies to carry out this study. Using overarching themes, researchers identified interrelationships between the projects’ goals and the methods utilised. They also formulated five lessons with a focus on future innovation programmes for the sector.
knowledge & community
Besides financial support, the Innovationlabs programme also offered coaching and guidance. The Fund and CLICKNL organised community sessions where experiences were shared and results (including interim results) were presented. Participants were stimulated to contribute their critical thoughts on each other’s innovation projects and to share their knowledge and insights with the sector. Coaches supported this process by helping participants to reflect on the progress of their project. Although each innovation project was unique and required its own approach, the coaches saw three recurring themes in all of the projects that defined the innovation process: money, time and skills.
exhibitions dutch design week
The project results of both editions of Innovationlabs were showcased during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. In October 2023, the exhibition Innovationlabs #1: The Living Archive presented the sixteen projects from the first edition, complemented by an Open Lab where visitors could test innovations. A year later, Innovationlabs #2: The Growing Archive followed with the seventeen projects from the second edition. The exhibitions brought together visitors, makers and organisations from the cultural and creative sector through interactive presentations, demonstrations and meetings. The Klokgebouw, where both exhibitions took place, attracted 60,000 visitors in 2023 and 58,000 in 2024
Discover more
Innovationlabs #2: The growing archive
Innovationlabs presents The Living Archive
Innovationlabs #2 – 17 projects selected
LFMC: 'Storytelling and polyphony is something that is in us'
Innovationlabs – 16 projects selected
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