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This year the government brought out its Innovation Nation white paper which sought to address some of these issues. Brighton’s researchers are at the cutting edge of much of the research into innovation and are asking vital questions about the way forward and about how the government can best promote enterprise, a matter of increasing national importance in the current economic climate.

Steve Flowers, principal research fellow at the university’s Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM), is studying how a particular type of innovation can be channelled. Innovation and innovation studies, he said, have tended to focus on mass production, on understanding how firms make things. However, many of the key innovations in modern business, particularly in burgeoning areas such as music, social networking and computer games, come from the users themselves.

“They change things and affect how things get adopted,” said Flowers. “Their impact is huge.” He called the Innovation Nation white paper “a step forward”, but added that recognising the issue is only the beginning. “Actually knowing how to encourage such innovation is quite hard.”

That is where his research comes in. It examines the circumstances in which such innovation flourishes, looking at the small band of

people worldwide who contribute to the major innovations in this area. The fact that they can be globally linked via the internet helps ideas to spread as does their apparent disregard for issues of copyright and ownership.

Much of the interesting work in user-innovation is being done in the field of the creative arts, particularly the crossover between creative arts and technology. Sometimes the tensions between artists can lead to an uneasy stand-off and can be a barrier to innovation. Good management is required to ensure both parties understand where they are coming from and work well together. Heavy-handed attempts to impose order on the creative process are known to be unsuccessful, but there is less certainty about what does work.

Dr Jonathan Sapsed, CENTRIM principal research fellow and AIM (Advanced Institute of Management) innovation fellow, said the problem with creative industries is that the stereotype of last-minute spurts of round-the-clock activity before the deadline tends to prevail. Dr Sapsed said that a certain amount of stress and deadline panic may be good for creative types, but what he is looking at is where creative stress turns into negative stress and how managers can stop this from happening while allowing the creatives to have enough space to be autonomous.

EconomyThe university contributes £330m to the regional economy and employs over 2,400 members of staff, but just as important is its research input into business innovation and creativity in the economy.

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His research focuses on “how you manage the creative process, how you integrate technical and artistic people so they deliver on time and have decent working conditions”. One of Dr Sapsed’s main research activities has been to lead the Creative Industries strand of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Business Engagement Project and to produce a research scoping study to suggest how higher education and business can work together to improve the management of creative industries. Last year he addressed the Society of Industrial and Organisational Psychology (SIOP) conference, Enabling Innovation in Organizations: The Leading Edge in the US on the ‘dark side of innovation’. His research findings looked at how to map and upgrade the creative and management processes of games development in the UK, for example by giving developers greater autonomy in their work.

Dr Sapsed is also conducting research through the Learning Games Network into the role of ‘serious’ educational games in the learning process and how these can substitute for traditional ways of learning.

Research at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture looks at how to make arts graduates more business-minded. A major study by David Clews points out the need for arts graduates to develop business skills. His research, Creating Entrepreneurship: higher education and the creative industries, has been favourably received by the government which is keen to look at new ways of promoting creative enterprise.

The creative industries are becoming increasingly important for the UK economy. The government estimates the creative economy employs some 1.8 million people in the UK. A recent report by the government states that ‘the UK creative industries outperform every other European state and in the 21st century they have moved to centre stage of the UK economy’. The government has set up a mapping process to keep up to date with changes in these

fast-moving sectors. It urgently requires hard evidence from academic researchers of ways to ensure these sectors flourish. The kind of research which Brighton’s academics are pushing forward.

For example, the Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage (EPOCH) programme is blazing a trail in the cultural heritage industry by bringing together experts in information technology with those in the cultural heritage industry – museum curators, archaeologists, librarians and conservationists – so that they can explore ways of digitising their collections.

One part of the project involved researchers Jim McLoughlin, Babak Sodagar and Dr Jaime Kaminski from the Brighton Business School’s CUBIST (Cultural Business – Impact, Strategy and Technology Management) Research Group in developing and testing ways of calculating the socio-economic impact of the heritage sector. They developed, for instance, a detailed economic valuation study of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, including estimates of its contribution to the local tourist economy.

The CUBIST research group provides a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to management of the culture and heritage sector. The group has expanded its research work into the social enterprise sector and worked on creating models for assessing issues ranging from environmental impact to corporate responsibility. It has co-developed, with Social Enterprise London, a social impact measurement methodology and training toolkit for social enterprises.

Other research being carried out by the university investigates the government’s role in promoting innovation. Lew Perren, Professor of Management Research at the Brighton Business School and his colleague, Peter Jennings at Sheffield, have studied how government websites around the world portray entrepreneurs and their role in society. They argue that governments use the language of enterprise in order to harness it to their own agenda and tend to portray entrepreneurs as dependent on government support.

Professor Perren and Peter Jennings’s research shows this emasculates entrepreneurs. They call on academics to see entrepreneurs as “more than cogs within the economic machine” and on policy makers to realise that they are not promoting enterprise by subjugating entrepreneurs to a government agenda.

Much of the research by Brighton’s academics has at its core the concept of academics working with business to transfer knowledge. For instance, ProfitNet is a successful scheme which was developed by the university and gives directors of around 500 firms in south-east England the chance to meet in small groups once a month to discuss commercial issues and business plans and offer each other advice and support.

Professor Howard Rush, head of CENTRIM, says it provides those taking part with “the equivalent of a non-executive board of directors”. The network was set up after 10 years of academic research into what would best help support companies. The idea has caught on and already international networks are being set up as far afield as South Africa. “The bonds that have been built between these directors are remarkable,” says Professor Rush.

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Dr Sapsed has been building up a portfolio of research projects around good practice in managing innovation in the creative industries. One project for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is researching process mapping and upgrading video games development, working with eight of the leading games studios in the UK. Its focus is on how creatives and programmers can be brought together as a team to develop games. Dr Sapsed, with his CENTRIM colleagues, Andrew Grantham and Juan Mateos-Garcia, presented a session on this at the annual industry conference earlier this year.

In a similar vein, Dr Sapsed has been awarded an AIM (Advanced Institute of Management Research) Innovation Fellowship which is jointly funded by the EPSRC and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He will look at digital advertising and how creative types can work with account planners and account managers on online advertising techniques, including virals.

The project seeks to find answers to questions of how the creative process is best managed, how technical and artistic people can work best in a team so that a good product is delivered on time without people working round the clock.

Dr Sapsed and the team are also working with local companies on idea generation. He wants to find out whether and which new methods aimed at facilitating brainstorming actually work. The research shows that software engineering methods like Agile and eXtreme Programming allow people from various skills backgrounds to collaborate openly for short periods on a particular creative project.

Dr Sapsed has looked at companies which have been successful in getting their employees to work reasonable hours and meet deadlines. One way is through process methods like Agile. Another is through limiting people’s access to emails and the internet so they can focus on a given task more fully.

One of Dr Sapsed’s main research activities has been to lead the Creative Industries strand of the ESRC’s Business Engagement Project and to produce a research scoping study to highlight how higher education and business can work together to improve the management of creative industries. He and his colleagues have interviewed people in the creative industries and looked at the literature around business management of the sector and five main themes have emerged as being important. These include integration and disintegration, understanding how innovation changes business models and markets, the creative process and organisation, management capabilities and skills, and small firms and growth.

Digital tools, online distribution (for instance, of music) and outsourcing of creative work to freelancers or agencies have had a big impact on the industry. In some creative fields, such as architecture, digital tools allow modelling and experimentation which was not possible before. According to Dr Sapsed important questions need to be asked about how this might affect creative thinking and working. Online distribution has led to a fragmented market and although outsourcing to international partners can help with the management of costs for complex creative projects, it can be difficult to manage.

“The rules of the game are changing in the creative industries,” said Dr Sapsed, “but the new rules are not entirely clear yet.” He added that some of the changes will be passing fads, but others will be more durable. The difficulty is over how the durable changes can best be spotted. Another area where new thinking is needed is over intellectual property rights.

Dr Sapsed’s research goes right to the heart of what promotes creativity. Considerable research has been done in an attempt to demystify the creative process, including what makes a working environment which is conducive to creativity, but more work needs to be done on looking at how technologies and forms of open collaboration might help to generate new ideas.

One of the most urgent problems facing creative industries is over management. “Many creative industries promote people to be managers without giving them any management training,” said Dr Sapsed and few have any established career paths mapped out. “The training courses that do exist often don’t provide the kind of training that the industry needs.” In some cases other countries are doing better, he added and the UK needs to catch up.

Finally, Dr Sapsed said many creative firms employ a handful of people and it is commonly assumed that they do not want to develop past a “lifestyle” business. He is looking at ways government policy might be used to help them move beyond small-scale concerns.

At the Business Engagement Forum for the Creative Industries held in March this year, the results of the research scoping exercise were presented to policy makers, academics, business people and others and the ESRC decided to focus on new research looking at how changes in the creative industries in the UK compared to those taking place internationally.

THE CULTURECRUNCHThe UK’s creative industries have traditionally suffered from “a culture of crunch”, according to Dr Jonathan Sapsed of the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM). This means projects only meet their deadlines by employees working very long hours as they begin to loom. “Pressure and deadlines can be quite beneficial,” said Dr Sapsed, “but there is a crunch point and we need to find out where that comes, how managers can help to prevent it, plus when they need to step back to allow staff the space to work autonomously.”

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Britain has a long history of developing new technologies, including many inventions which have been developed by lay practitioners rather than corporate experts. The last 20-30 years have seen a speeding up in the rate of user-led innovation.

“The internet has accelerated and magnified activity,” said Steve Flowers from the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM). “Innovators can get in touch with like-minded people easily. There have always been communities of inventors, but they can now link up globally. This has had a huge impact.”

It is only recently that the government has recognised this with its Innovation Nation white paper published earlier this year. Flowers’ research has been looking at how policy can help encourage innovation which is led by users or consumers. Much of industry has been transformed by user-led innovation but often in different ways, said Flowers.

Social networking and the IT industry rely on user-led innovation, but areas like music have had more problems. “The music industry tried to keep tight control, but users are no longer just simple consumers and now innovate in both the creation and distribution of music. File sharing is not necessarily a good thing,” said Flowers. “But the industry cannot ignore it. The ability of consumers to modify products and influence how things get adopted is now huge.”

For other industries, like financial services, user-led innovation is not encouraged as it is highly regulated. Each industry may need a particular set of policies around user-led innovation, said Flowers. What works for one industry will not work for all.

Today’s innovators share some general characteristics: they tend to set aside copyright concerns, be passionate about their subject and be open to the free exchange of information.

Business, on the other hand, often seeks to control copyright and keep its ideas under wraps. Flowers adds that people have said that user-led innovation has caused the democratisation of innovation, but innovation is often driven by a small group of highly skilled individuals. Similarly, the world of user-led innovation research is relatively small, but this is growing all the time as it has more impact on industry and policy.

“We are at the stage where we are asking quite hard questions and are only beginning to collect the data to provide strong answers,” said Flowers. To address this, Flowers and colleagues at the University of Sussex are continuing to develop their research in this area and will also be publishing a book on user-led innovation in the near future.

INNOVATION ON DEMAND

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Steve Flowers

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We are used to the idea that our newspapers, cars and houses are designed digitally, using the latest software. However, the use of computers to help record and display our cultural heritage is still in its infancy.

EPOCH – Excellence in Processing Open Cultural Heritage – has brought experts in information technology together with museum curators, archaeologists, librarians and conservationists, to find common ground on digitising collections and artefacts.

Research on digital technologies can be used to help cultural preservation in many ways. One of the most basic is to create databases of information that allow those working in the cultural heritage sector to find comprehensive information easily. A system for effectively gathering information about paintings, sculptures, buildings and monuments makes it simpler for scholars to study them and curators to organise exhibitions.

Digital technology also has great potential to enhance the way that cultural artefacts are displayed. As broadband technology develops, so websites can now show not just photographs of artefacts, but also three-dimensional digital models of statues, ceramics and carvings.

EPOCH’s researchers have developed a website in which digital photographs of an artefact can be turned into a 3D computer model which the viewer can rotate and examine.

Locally, the team has worked with the Brighton Fishing Museum to develop a computer game displayed on terminals inside the museum. This leads children on a hunt through the museum to get information needed to get them to the next stage of the game.

“We realised that there were gaps in understanding between computer specialists and people in the cultural heritage sector,” said Professor David Arnold, who leads the research. “Those in cultural heritage were suspicious that information technology would not be able to deliver and computer specialists were frustrated at the caution of those in cultural heritage.

“We worked with both, bringing them together so that they could work more effectively together. We set up a network of centres which bring together experts from many fields to discuss the use of digital technology.”

Professor Arnold, who is Dean of Management and Information Sciences at the University of Brighton, said his team had worked with the British Museum, the National Museums Scotland and Brighton Pavilion.

Other uses of IT that have come from the project include developing a portable dome, about a metre across, into which artefacts can be placed and photographed under controlled lighting, allowing images to be produced which simulate any arrangement of lighting and give the impression of 3D.

The researchers have also experimented with an automatic page-turning device that museum visitors can use to turn the pages of old books protected behind glass cases. They are also involved in developing the technology for digitally recording underwater sites and artefacts such as shipwrecks.

The longer term potential is considerable – for example, to create an interactive ‘virtual’ tour guide in museums which use IT to answer visitors’ questions. But achieving natural language conversation will need considerable development in the way that computers can recognise and correctly react to the nuances of human language.

Another project is developing the study to use mobile technologies like phones with Bluetooth or GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to give people information about nearby museums, galleries and other cultural centres. This is updated automatically and quickly as they tour a city.

“Information technology has great promise for the way that we can disseminate our cultural artefacts,” said Professor Arnold. “We can use it to produce films of exhibitions and artefacts, computer games and interactive virtual museums.

“This can never replace experiencing the real thing – artefacts, works of art, monuments or building – first hand and it is not intended to. But it can enhance our experience of these, and can give us the chance to see them on our computer screens if we are not able to visit cultural sites.

“In some cases, we might be able to use a scanned image to see close-up detail of an object which we cannot see in real life because it is roped off to protect it.

“By digitising artefacts, we are in one sense helping to preserve them for the future should they for any reason not be available in real-life and we can manage the visitors to reduce wear and tear on the original sites.”

EPOCH was a four-year project co-funded by the EU which finished in 2008 and has led to around 30 books and 200 research papers. Brighton coordinated the other 94 partners in the project.

Digitising our cultural heritage Many of us would like to see great works of art like the statue of David by Michelangelo, but the journey to Florence and the long queues may put us off. A project has laid the foundations for digitising our cultural heritage so that we can see works of art on our computers.

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3D computer model of Pompeii shops© VRlab EPFL and CVlab ETHZ, Switzerland

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The traditional system is that a company making a product – a motor car for instance – will get various smaller suppliers to provide separate components and then assemble them to create the final product.

But some business projects are so complex that to produce them, a group of large companies have to come together to contribute to different parts of the final product, simply because no single company and its supplier group can cope alone.

In this new model, one firm, called a systems integrator or prime contractor, is designated to coordinate the project. However, it usually does not have the traditional power over the other equally large and powerful contributing businesses as it does over its suppliers, so a new way of working together is needed.

Many of these projects are funded by government or large business buyers, and examples include the construction of the Channel Tunnel and software projects for huge organisations like the NHS.

Several years ago, Professor Mike Hobday and Professor Howard Rush of the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM) at Brighton, realised that there was little research into how these types of projects were organised. Professor Hobday has since written a book and research papers about this. He and colleagues gained access to companies, including Cable & Wireless, to see how they went about these joint projects, a process Professor Hobday calls the business of systems integration.

“It struck me that you can pick up books about how to manage staff, businesses or suppliers at the business section of any airport bookstall,” said Professor Hobday, “but there was nothing on how to work alongside large partner firms in these enormously complex projects.

“It’s a very complex task because the coordinating company often has no direct power over its partners in the scheme in the same way that it does over its suppliers, and its partners are often bigger than it is, so it becomes a process of negotiation, persuasion and diplomacy that is different to other business relationships.

“We have a lot of experience of it in the west, more so than say in China or South Korea, where business relationships are more traditional.

“There are some excellent examples of successes, such as Cable &Wireless’s organisation of various firms working on larger telecoms schemes, or Alstom’s ability to fulfil large orders for train services. But there are also too many failures, including the NHS IT projects and the opening of Heathrow Terminal 5, where clearly the relationships between the large organisations did not work effectively.”

By enabling firms to share best practices in these types of projects, the research has benefited many of the business partners in the research programme – and provided a solid base of knowledge for others to learn from.

CONSTRUCTING COMPLEX PROJECTS

As the products, systems and networks that industry makes get ever more complex, so too do the business relationships needed to create them grow more intricate. Recent research is aiming to understand this new business model.

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Panoramic view inside one of the two rail tunnels© Eurotunnel

But 500 firms in south-east England are taking advantage of ProfitNet, a successful scheme developed by the university in which directors from companies meet once a month in groups of around a dozen to talk about commercial issues, discuss their business plans and offer each other advice and support.

“They give a presentation on their business plans and where they are going, and the rest of the group questions them and challenges them and gives them feedback and support,” said Professor Howard Rush, the head of CENTRIM (Centre for Research in Innovation Management), which developed the scheme. “The others act as a business support network – so all those attending get the equivalent of a non-executive board of directors to help them.”

CENTRIM, in collaboration with the university’s Business Services Office, set up the network after 10 years’ academic research into the kind of scheme which would best benefit companies. Their work has paid off: a recent survey into ProfitNet’s members found that 89 per cent had made improvements to their business as a result of taking part, 82 per cent said they had significantly improved their management skills and 68 per cent said they had improved their business strategy.

The idea has caught on and groups have been organised in Ireland and Durban, South Africa, and the scheme has had interest from Brazil, Chile, Germany, France, Greece and Lithuania. This international interest is impressive given that the scheme only began in 2004.

Member companies include start-up businesses, sole traders and social enterprises such as charities, as well as larger, more-established companies, like firms in construction, manufacturing and creative industries. Because those attending the meetings can bring a variety of skills, the businesses can benefit in many ways, such as improving turnover and profitability, learning to manage the development and introduction of new products and services, developing new marketing strategies and simply giving those with the burden of responsibility a feeling that they are not alone.

“The bonds that have been built between these directors are remarkable,” said Professor Rush. “When we first put the idea forward, some people were doubtful that firms that might be business rivals could work together, but the face-to-face meetings have greatly increased the degree of trust and interaction.”

For CENTRIM it represents the successful application of its ‘closing the loop’ philosophy of transferring knowledge from academia to business to benefit both: at each of the monthly workshops two facilitators, trained by the university, attend to ensure its smooth running.

“An integral part of the venture is the ongoing academic research which serves as the R&D arm of the scheme” said Dr George Tsekouras, the Academic Director of the project. “Issues like the dynamics of the firm relationships, the developing linkages of the involved businesses with universities and the impact on their absorptive capacity are investigated by a team of academic researchers with a view of feeding back the results to the operations.”

Research papers have been published in several international conferences and journals. The research has been funded by the EU, the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) and the South East England Development Agency.

Finding theskills to profitIn this age of fierce free-market competition, the idea that directors from rival companies should meet together regularly to advise each other on how to run their firms might sound a little idealistic.

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Professor Howard Rush

David Clews’ research says that more needs to be done to train the 160,000 students who are taking arts, design and media subjects in universities so that they are best prepared for the business world.

The report, ‘Creating Entrepreneurship: higher education and the creative industries’ points out that many designers, artisans and architects set up their own businesses during their careers, and so it is important to make sure that they can take flexible courses at any time in their working lives to give them the business skills they need.

The report, commissioned by the Higher Education Academy Art Design Media Subject Centre and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, also points out that many graduates enter into careers in non-commercial organisations. These are often large financial concerns which also market their services as commercial businesses and to achieve this their managers need strong business skills. This suggests that courses not normally considered to be commercial, such as fine art, also need to help students to develop more entrepreneurial approaches to their future practice.

“A significant amount of work is being done to raise entrepreneurship education as part of the curriculum for art and design students,” said Mr Clews, a former practising architect and now part of the Faculty of Arts and Architecture. “But it would also be true to say that there remains a significant challenge to deliver this.”

The most important consideration was to ensure that the curriculum was flexible and was designed both for students and people in mid-career too, he said. The government was interested in the report’s conclusions as it wanted to ensure that Britain’s workforce was fully educated and the economy highly skilled.

Clews also recommended that universities develop further their links with local businesses, something that he said had improved over the past few years. He stated it was ironic that universities had made greater efforts to attract businesses to work with them, but the language universities used to describe their work was so convoluted and complex it had deterred many business people from working with them.

entrepreneurshipDESIGNING

Britain plc is missing out by not training its artists and designers fully in how to be entrepreneurs, according to a report by a Brighton researcher.

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