Art UK: An unexpected case study in innovation strategy
An independent arts charity, Art UK, has risen to international prominence using an innovation strategy based on the creation of a series of intermediate products; the same strategy that was pioneered by the Wright Brothers.
Art UK, which launched on Wednesday, is the first thing of its kind: an organisation dedicated to providing online access to a nation’s collection of publicly-owned art.
On this occasion, Art UK is launching with the whole of the UK’s collection of oil paintings and a mission to progressively add more, starting with publicly-owned sculpture.
One of my fellow trustees, the artist Bob and Roberta Smith, put it in a nutshell:
’Through public collections we all own art’.
It is all about connecting the public with the art they own and creating value for everyone (the public, museums, schools and artists) in the process.
The organisation behind Art UK is not, as you might have expected, a public department or a coalition of industry heavyweights. It is an independent charity, originally called the Public Catalogue Foundation, that has bootstrapped itself from nothing at all to international prominence.
As one of Art UK’s trustees I’m hugely proud of the product. Take a look and see for yourself. It is beautiful, easy-to-use, joyful, funny and inspiring all at once. Just what you would hope for.
But more than the product, I’m also proud of the strategy that lies behind it; a strategy that is a model case study for innovation in its economy, ambition and the value of its results.
Strategy, particularly innovation strategy, is something I’ve thought a lot about. Having worked with many organisations over three decades, trying to understand the difference between good and bad innovation programmes is an itch that I’ve been scratching for quite a while.
As I now see it, all strategy plays out in two dimensions: a vertical dimension, up and down the organisation, and a horizontal dimension, across the activities that combine to create the operation.
The Art UK story is worth considering as a model in both dimensions.
Considering an organisation vertically, you usually find three levels: leadership, management and operations. Pretty much every organisation has these three levels and the smooth and productive interaction between them is critical.
The three level structure of Art UK is embodied in a board of trustees, a management board, a hugely energetic and effective chief executive and an ultra-lean team of highly motivated staff. Every aspect of the Art UK operation has been honed to ensure good communication between all three levels (i.e. regular, high quality, sensibly documented, involving diverse voices). This sounds like common sense. And it is. But it’s amazing how many organisations don’t have this basic structure working properly.
If Art UK is a decent model of vertical orientation, the strategy for horizontal development of the components of its operation is the really unexpected case study.
The classic model for Art UK’s approach is the Wright Brothers’ development of powered flight. Unlike their rivals who sought to jump straight to an airplane, the Wright Brothers patiently decomposed the problem into its component parts and perfected each in turn. In their case the sequence was lift (kites), control (gliders), propulsion (propellers), power (engines).
Art UK did something similar. For us the sequence has been photography and cataloguing, rights, online publication, value creation.
In this approach to strategy, intermediate (and quite different) products are funded and realised on the way to delivering your ultimate vision.
Here’s how it worked:
Art UK is a digital operation, and pretty early on it was clear that its future would always be digital. But its work began, as the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), by compiling and publishing printed catalogues on a county-by-county basis. The digital rights that now enable the Art UK online operation were originally acquired as a side-effect of the book publishing operation. In retrospect this was a stroke of strategic genius.
Genius for two reasons: the book publication gave a tangible, conventional and comprehensible output that could be the target of a geographically-based grassroots fundraising campaign; and on the rights front it was much easier for collections to grant digital rights in the context of a book project than it would have been if they had been approached solely for digital rights.
The initial catalogue project would have been wholly impractical if it were not for the PCF’s great technical innovation: the development of a system for photography that reduced costs by roughly an order of magnitude against the existing alternatives. Using freelance photographers and a stripped down, systematic method, work that would have taken decades and cost tens of millions was done quickly and cost effectively.
Working from the grassroots up and with a combination of charm, efficiency and persistence, the PCF drew in the national collections alongside local authority and other collection holders to build an unprecedented network of 3,000 organisations. This collaboration is supported by an active and representative steering panel and embodied in the license agreements for online publication. This collection of license agreements is, it is a fair to say, an outstanding asset for Art UK (and the nation), but one that defies capture in the organisation’s balance sheet
Having got the photography and the rights operations worked out and a funding model to sustain them, the PCF then did another unconventional thing. Instead of publishing the art works themselves via their own online operation, they negotiated a deal with the BBC to do it for them. This has been, until last week, the Your Paintings website on bbc.co.uk.
Your Paintings, like the books, was always an indirect step on the way to larger goal. In this case, the arrangement with the BBC allowed the PCF to concentrate its very limited resources on the content and rights work before taking on the task of building and running a major online service. It leveraged the BBC’s capacity to provide digital infrastructure and drive great levels of traffic. Although the ambition of Your Paintings had to be limited by BBC Charter restrictions and BBC budgets, their awesome reach gave us a chance to learn what works and show potential funders how much appetite there is for our material (currently about 300,000 monthly unique visitors and growing).
Based on the success of Your Paintings, Art UK has been able to find the resources for their own new site, online today at www.artuk.org, and the public-facing Art UK brand that goes with it. And so the organisation that started in 2002 as the Public Catalogue Foundation can show the world what it’s really been up to as we begin the next phase of our journey; our goal now to unlock all the value that has been created over fourteen years of rigorous and dedicated strategic and collaborative effort.
For anyone interested in art, Art UK is a great resource. I hope you enjoy it.
For anyone interested in innovation strategy, study the Wright Brothers or Art UK. They may give you ideas that will help you achieve great things.
About the author: Alex Morrison has been a trustee at Art UK since 2011. His day job is managing director/founder at Cogapp, an agency that helps organisations with high standards and large public audiences to enrich people’s lives using digital media.
