Understanding the impact of Knowledge Exchange

The Creativeworks London Festival

Back in 2011, there was excitement about Knowledge Exchange Hubs, which aim to link researchers with creative businesses and organisations.

There are four across the country. Here in London, we have Creativeworks. It is a huge initiative — thirty-eight London-based universities, colleges, museums, libraries and archives.

Now in its final year, we know from other projects that there are a range of challenges around University / business collaboration. Here is a list of the “success criteria” from previous research we have done on the issue, for Creative England and the AHRC:

“Successful Knowledge Exchange activity is Informal, individual and network-led; appropriate for a business’ stage of maturity; highly collaborative; highly networked; cross disciplinary; accessible and brokered; including a systematised approach to innovation; providing access to finance; providing access to new markets; led by evidence and with a recognition of success.”

We’re now working on the evaluation of Creativeworks, with our Iain Bennett chairing a panel debate on ‘Collaborative research and the creative entrepreneur’s journey’ at this Friday’s Creativeworks London Festival (King’s College, Friday 29 April). The panel looks at:

• ​How does collaboration between artists or early stage creative businesses and arts & humanities researchers drive ideation, value creation and sustainability?
• And how can we measure the impact of those interventions across the business life cycle?

​Joining Iain will be Dr Martin Smith, special advisor to Ingenious Media; Professor Andy Pratt, Director of the Centre for Culture and the Creative Industries at City University; Lara Ratnaraja, Senior Research Facilitator at the Digital Humanities Hub at the University of Birmingham; Paul Bason, Director of Digital Innovation at Manchester Metropolitan University; and Graham Hitchen, a member of the UK Design Commission of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Design and Innovation, and Chair of Creative Islington.

For more details of the event and how to register are here.