So what did William Shipley do in 1754?

The surprising things our researchers discovered.

We started out on this project thinking about what William Shipley would do if he was starting the RSA today rather than in 1754, but of course that’s meant finding out what he and his mates actually did do. As Catie, our lead researcher has written, she and Hasmita and our team of Nottingham students spent time researching this, including going down to RSA House in London and quizzing archivists and CEO Matthew Taylor.

And there were some surprises in what they found out — for me anyway — and I’ve been thinking about the parallels with today.

We know that Shipley and the founding members of the RSA met at a coffee shop in 1754 and agreed the aims of the society,

“to promote the arts, manufactures, and commerce of this kingdom by giving honorary or pecuniary rewards…for the communication to the society, and through the society to the public, of all such useful inventions, discoveries, and improvements as tend to that purpose”

So basically they planned to give rewards to encourage people to come up with useful stuff but also to use the giving of awards as a way of publicising innovations and encouraging others to get involved. And they advertised the RSA competitions widely in newspapers and public places. It’s a great strategy frequently used today with awards sponsored by many different organisations. I know lots of independent businesses and social enterprises that enter awards as part of their marketing activities because they believe in what they do, aspire to be the best in their field, and hope to put ‘award-winning’ on their business cards and web-sites.

They also used crowd-sourcing to come up with new solutions for problems, highlighting topical problem(s) Great Britain had and running competitions to source new ideas (including offering an award for reducing smoke emissions in 1770). Public subscription was used to raise money to fund these problem-solvers — and we thought Kickstarter was new!

But the thing our team discovered that really grabbed me was that in the competitions and awards, there was a stipulation that ideas should not be patented but available for all to use and build upon, In 1761, the Society held the first exhibition of prize-winning models of machines created by members. Patented models were specifically excluded meaning anybody could use the ideas they saw, improve upon them or profit from them. Surely the forerunner of the open source movement and in direct contrast to today’s myriad of patent legislation and litigation.

I like to think Shipley’s grand vision was creating a co-design process encouraging the democratic involvement of people across arts, manufacturing and business to address social challenges. So I’m beginning to think maybe we need to ask not what would William Shipley do today but how can we do what William Shipley did — and better!