Volume 2 (2009): Issue 1 (November 2009)

This paper, first presented at a symposium on the ‘past, present and future of cultural studies,’ traces disciplinary changes in the study of culture from the perspective of ‘cultural science,’ a term that was used by some of the earliest practitioners of cultural studies, including Raymond Williams. The paper goes on to describe some problems with cultural studies as it has become institutionalised. It suggests that some of the concerns of the present moment, including work on the creative industries, show that a new version of cultural science is needed, based on evolutionary principles, in dialogue with the evolutionary approach in economics that was called for a century ago by Thorstein Veblen. This evolutionary turn, or ‘cultural science 2.0,’ it is argued, offers a radical and challenging future for cultural studies.

Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is about adding value to products and services, to ways of undertaking tasks, and developing policies through the application of ideas that are new in a particular context. The importance of innovation flows from an understanding that the future of advanced economies lies in exploiting knowledge. This application of new ideas is essential in creating and maintaining high-value products and services which are prized within global markets. Policymakers increasingly recognise that their ability to address urgent social issues also rests on a wholesale commitment to innovation. Solutions to social problems such as terrorism, climate change, public health issues and ageing populations will require fresh thinking and the combined use of technological, cultural, social and economic change. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role that arts and humanities research plays in innovation and the challenges faced in making the most of its knowledge. It then goes on to explore the public funding structures that support this research in the UK, and the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in particular.

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’. While work undertaken in cultural studies has contributed to these developments, the development of neo-liberalism as a meta-concept in critical theory constitutes a substantive barrier to more sustained engagement between cultural studies and economics, as it rests upon a caricature of economic discourse. The paper draws upon Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism to indicate that there are significant problems with the neo-Marxist account hat became hegemonic over the 2000s. The paper concludes by identifying areas such as the value of information, the value of networks, motivations for participation in online social networks, and the impact of business cycles on cultural sectors as areas of potentially fruitful inter-disciplinary engagement around the nature of cultural economy.

New advances in collaborative technologies, often grouped under the umbrella term ‘web 2.0’, are changing the opportunity space for organisational collaboration and decision making. Research and development can now be outsourced to external self-organising communities of scientists, new business models rely wholly on content created by end users and customers are increasingly asked for input to the development of new products and services. The way in which many strategic and operational decisions are made, once the sole prevail of executive management, is being challenged by new forms of knowledge, expertise and opinion from non-management employees, and increasingly, from those outside the organisation such as customers, partners and suppliers. The widespread adoption of web 2.0 technologies and their increasing use in the business context, in other words, is creating an inevitable tension between traditional ‘top-down’ strategic decision-making principles and ‘bottom-up’, ad hoc and sometimes unstructured collaborative processes.

This paper examines recent changes to the innovation process and the advent of so-called fifth generation innovation, and discusses the way in which web 2.0 technologies are further evolving these models, highlighting that ideation technologies are an important part of the new breed of so-called innovation technologies. It then explores the particular example of jam events, which bring together a targeted group of participants on the web for a time-limited period to respond to a specific challenge, defined by decision-makers, with ideas, opinions and votes in a socially mediated process. The final section introduces the concept of co-created strategy, and discusses the factors required for an organisation to build the absorptive capacity needed to truly take advantage of the new knowledge created by ideation technologies.

The ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) commissioned two jams –online collaborative events – to discover new ideas for improving outcomes in two important aspects of the Centre’s work.

The first jam – known as the CCi Mainstreaming Challenge - was held for two weeks from 8^th to 23^rd June 2009 and focused on findings ways to improve the mainstream impact of the Centre’s research. The event involved 112 participants from the CCi’s nodes around Australia and internationally, CCi Advisory Board members and a select group of external ‘critical friends’ (see Appendix A for a full participant list). Participants posted their own ideas, and commented and voted on the ideas of others, on a challenge question related to improving the mainstream impact of the Centre’s research. In total the jam generated 22 substantial new ideas, 103 votes and 96 comments.

The second jam – known as the CCi RHD Challenge – was held from June 8^th to 24^th 2009 to elicit ideas and opinions from the Centre’s Research Higher Degree (RHD) community on how to improve their professional development experience and outcomes during their student tenure. The event invited 75 RHD students to participate and was kept exclusive to this group (i.e. no involvement from supervisors or Centre management). In total the community generated 17 ideas, 26 comments and 78 votes.

This report summarises the key results and insights generated from both Challenges, and is divided into three parts: Section One describes the challenges around which these two events were focused and participation rates achieved, while Section Two summarises the outcomes in terms of statistics and trends by theme, as well as the value of the tool for ‘capturing the long tail’ of collaborative processes. Section Three concludes by presenting the top ideas by popularity and activity, as well as identifying the ideas that most polarised opinion and emergent themes.