Progress in 2012
Cunningham, with substantial research assistance from Luke Jaaniste, completed his book Hidden Innovation: Industry, Policy and the Creative Sector, which will be published March 2013. It covers the academic debates generated around the creative industries, global trends in innovation policy, screen industry and social media dynamics, public innovation as it is practiced and contested in public service media, questions of the creative workforce and creative cities, and case studies of ‘actually existing innovation’ in and through the sector. Cunningham also co-edited Digital Disruption: Cinema moves On-line.
Ryan, Verhoeven and Cunningham completed the second iteration of the Australian Screen Producer Survey. The first iteration, funded by CCI and led out of partner institution AFTRS, revealed the dynamics and differences between screen producer identities and practices in film, television, commercials/corporate and new media, and resulted in articles and a report which received substantial coverage in 2010. The second iteration was published as a report; academic output and an interactive interface for the data are being prepared.
Potts moved to the RMIT node of CCI, extending work into innovation and design, including with the ABC. He was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship on innovation commons. Potts and Earl’s work on creative cycles in firms was developed.
Bakhshi visited Australia in March as Distinguished Visitor, making public speeches on cultural value and R&D in the arts in Brisbane and Sydney which received national media coverage. Bakhshi, in collaboration with CCI Senior Research Fellow, Peter Higgs and CCI associate researcher and QUT Adjunct Professor Alan Freeman, developed CCI’s Creative Trident into a tool for systematically identifying creative industries and applied it to the UK in the CCI-Nesta report A Dynamic Mapping for the UK’s Creative Economy. Bakhshi initiated a project with the Beijing-based social network Douban on how Chinese social data can increase understanding of Chinese demand for British cultural content. In June 2012 he published a first CCI-Nesta-AHRC-British Council paper from the project with Philippe Schneider Crossing the River by Searching for Stones.
Goldsmith commenced ongoing research on the apps industry in Australia, with academic outputs to date including presentations at the Hyperconnected Sydney conference in July (on television futures and apps) and the CCI Symposium in Perth. Research on apps informed Cunningham’s work with the NSW Creative Industries Task Force. A short chapter on the apps industry will appear in the forthcoming edition of The Media and Communication in Australia.
Policy submission writing, appointments and engagement with policy processes, and knowledge transfer activity continued in 2012. Highlights included CCI submissions to the Convergence Review by Goldsmith, Cunningham and Julian Thomas continued the engagement with the Convergence Review, with two articles published on aspects of the Final Report. Convergence Review member Malcolm Long, a featured speaker at CCI Symposium July 2012, reflected on the work of the CCI in the context of Australian public policy.
New Knowledge Generated
A new theoretical approach to innovation policy is being developed by Potts, linking the work of Elinor Ostrom and Joseph Schumpeter.
Ryan has focused on demonstrating how screen producers, once producing for single-medium media markets, are adapting their practices to function in a digital media and multi-platform marketplace.