A busy week all round with the launch of the School of Management’s new Research Centre for Strategic Innovation on Thursday evening. About 40 people turned out overall to hear a panel consisting of John Bessant, Gerard George and Sally Jane Norman – leading academics in the field, talk about the opportunities and challenges of the new innovation landscape. Looking forward to a stream of events in the coming year – I’ll be keeping you posted!

Yes, it’s that time of year, and this will be the first full year for our School in the newly-formed Faculty of Art, Business and Law at Southampton. I’m kicking off the new academic year with an informal lunch to get some interdisciplinary groups working on the creative industries and digital media. This builds on last year’s series of talks on commercialisation in various spheres from Profs. Tony Wasserman, Scott Shane and Charles Davis from the US/Canada. I have links from two of these lectures/workshops, which I’ve posted before, but it’s useful to see them together 

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Southampton School of Management has an EU-funded collaboration with Normandie Business School which has campuses in Caen, Deauville and Le Havre. This week I made my first visit, taking in the campuses at Caen and Le Havre (Deauville wasn’t accessible because of the G8 summit). I met some great new colleagues and developed some research connections in creative industries/digital media. Notable sights were the Chateau Breuil which we visited one evening and the Honfleur bridge on the road between Caen and Le Havre. Looking forward to future developments as there are some fantastic connection to develop in the maritime industries, given the different histories in our two different locations.

Visited Barcelona this week to take part in the Creative Regions in Europe conference. Good to meet old colleagues and new friends, hear critique of Creative Cities concept, but plenty of successes too. The slides are below.

I had an excellent trip to London this week to what might seem like two quite disparate events. Firstly, a workshop/forum organised by the Maritime Innovation Leadership Council held at the Institute for Marine Engineering, Science and Technology. Secondly, to hear one of my research collaborators, Professor Sally Jane Norman give a lecture on the sense of place in theatre to Sussex alumni at the Royal Society for the Arts. This lecture was of course re;ated to her new post as Director of the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts on the Falmer campus. Connection between the two? Well the MILC initiative is clearly aimed at developing economic business benefits from (in part) better understanding of the supply chain (or wider, value networks) in the complex maritime ecosystem in the UK – sound plan for UK plc. Place and theatre? The sense of seeing things differently, making new connections — the very stuff of disruptive innovation and the re-shaping of entrepreneurial landscapes. The sense of wonder that arises from that wider sense of potential disjuncture is the very lifeblood of innovation, stimulating, thinkers, inventors, engineers and designers to create radically new pmaterials, systems, services. I saw it with great clarity. A good day.

Another excellent event I enjoyed very much earlier this month was a workshop at King’s College, London, at the Centre for e-Research, Digital Humanities Collective Intelligence: a workshop to foster international cooperation, chaired by Stuart Dunn. good to meet new friends and old looking to secure greater connection across Europe for the Digital Humanities.

I had a great time earlier this month thanks to the hospitality of Tony Emmerson, Head of Science at the English College in Prague . i gave a talk on Science Entrepreneurship to a group of around 20 students studying for their Baccalaureat. I really enjoyed the questions at the end – very bright, polite students who were a credit to the College and to Tony. All in all, a great stay, and I was introduced to some great pubs and the famous Reduta jazz club too where Bill Clinton and Vaclav Havel famously bonded over saxophone playing. Thanks again Tony.

A slightly belated note to say how much I enjoyed my time with Creative Industries colleagues at INESC in Porto – some great incubation work going on out there. Here’s my presentation – looking forward to continuing this theme in near future.

“I can create ‘behaviour’” says Golan Levin, one of the exhibitors at Decode: Digital Design Sensations, an exhibition running at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until April 11. The exhibition,  a joint collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations. Levin’s comment was made in an interview (transcript available in Decode’s accompanying programme) in response to the question, “What do digital technologies allow you to do or investigate that other design tools do not?”. For me, it really gets to the heart of the three themes of the exhibition:

Code as a raw material

interactivity

the network (as in digital traces)

As I walked around the exhibition, it was clear that people were fascinated by the exhibits, excited, laughing, talking to people they didn’t know already…..maybe not new behaviours in one sense, but fairly untypical of formal art exhibitions. And certainly, they were forging new connections, maybe developing new links outside their existing sphere of influence.  These kind of interactions and connections across contexts can be be the spark that ignites innovation – maybe a small, incremental innovation, or maybe something big enough to change a market, society or the world – who knows? That’s the beauty of complexity theory, which underpins much of my research, potentially large effects from small changes in initial conditions.  That is why it is so vital to fund the leading edge artists and groups who are able to to challenge us in ways that make us think and indeed behave differently – especially in the Digital Economy, as I know from my own work with Proboscis*.  Of course it is difficult to quantify that kind of contribution in straitened times, but we can and must do so.

In one of those quirks of timing, I came home to the fervour for the newly-launched  iPad on twitter.  My colleague Tim Greenhalgh suggests that the iPad will form a nexus between the liberal arts and the network and will change everything.  Whether that device is ‘the gamechanger’ or not, it’s pretty clear that the power to create content, move it around, enjoy it, in all kinds of ways is now out of the lab and into the hands of the public.  Let’s make sure our creative artists have the space they need to make that happen, as Levin suggests, through creating new behaviours.  And as  a researcher in innovation, I want to focus on value creation as new products, service and indeed behaviours emerge.

Footnote

If that last paragraph was about networking and interactivity, where does code as a raw material come in? Perhaps best illustrated by example.  In all the joie de vivre, beauty and colour of yesterday’s exhibition, I was perhaps most taken by a quieter work by Troika, Digital Zoetrope. I do see a lot of beautiful images as I love space stuff, Hubble, NASA and so on.  I love the different renderings.  I also look at fractals a lot, and i have seen interactive installations before.  A fabulous excess!  Troika is diferent, a monochromatic barrel with vertical, horizontal and diagonal typefaces rotating quickly, which merge into letters and words at speed.  It reminded me of Wender’s black and white masterpiece Wings of Desire, where Angels hear sense from the whispered thoughts of thousands in Berlin.  It made me think of two new friends I have made on twitter in the North of England.  It made me think we have joked of having a dvd film festival weekend of German, or film noir, together at some point.  It made me think I should do it soon.  Now, I may be giving an invited talk for one of them, a lecturer in the Performing Arts in early February.  Who knows what may come of that?

*makers of mischief, and pioneers of pie in the sky