Building resilience for the future
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Five years ago, here at the Arts Council we established our first ever Enterprise and Innovation team, tasked with embedding innovation and entrepreneurialism in the creative and cultural sector. The remit of this team is broad, encompassing income generation and business models, philanthropy, alternative means of finance, digital transformation, and environmental responsibility.
All of this work plays its own part in helping achieve the vision of Let’s Create, but our innovation work has a particular focus on the Dynamism Investment Principle and its ambition to develop a more entrepreneurial sector; one that is mature in its use of technology and data, and develops the skills of its workforce to meet future needs.
Over the last five years, we’ve delivered a range of programmes to work towards this ambition. We’ve established the Digital Culture Network and created the Digital Culture Compass, two of the main policy commitments from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Culture is Digital report. We’ve partnered with Digital Catapult on the CreativeXR programme, supporting R&D and prototyping of new content for immersive technology alongside business model development. We’ve worked to develop alternative finance vehicles, offering social impact loans through the Arts and Culture Impact Fund as part of a consortia led by Nesta, as well as establishing the Creative Land Trust, a collaborative approach to securing artists’ workspace in London.
Like the rest of the Arts Council, the team has been involved in delivering the Culture Recovery Fund, leading on the Repayable Finance programme which made loans to the sector, supporting some of the largest publicly-funded organisations as well as many commercial organisations.
We’ve also been developing the detail of Dynamism itself. When we first established this Investment Principle in response to what we heard through the consultation that informed Let’s Create, we knew Dynamism needed to reflect resilience as a way to move with shocks rather than withstand them. The events of early 2020 and the subsequent two years have made what we already thought was important, absolutely critical.
What has really struck us is how well and how quickly the sector adapted during the pandemic, particularly in the necessary switch to using digital technology as a way to continue reaching people. At the same time, we saw many individuals and organisations finding creative ways to embed themselves in local communities and deliver valuable social outcomes. What was also impressive was how quickly organisations adapted to new ways of working, reconfiguring their structures, developing and acquiring new skills and experimenting to find new ways to reach their audiences and meet their missions.
As we emerge from the pandemic, many organisations are restarting their pre-pandemic business models. However, we are living in a time of unprecedented disruption and an uncertain future. We believe that the sector needs to retain the dynamic capabilities and behaviours that were so essential in lockdown. In order to respond to changing needs, behaviours and wider social change, organisations need to be flexible and adaptable in order to quickly capitalise on emerging opportunities. The need for innovation, particularly within business models, therefore isn’t about innovation for the sake of innovation, but about building resilience and thriving through embracing change and experimentation.
How we support the sector to do this will evolve over the lifetime of Let’s Create, responding to the needs of cultural organisations as well as the landscape we’re all operating in. In response to what we saw in the pandemic though, we’re kicking off with the Reset and Innovation programme.
Delivering the Reset and Innovation programme is one of the actions we pledged to take as part of the Building a ‘fit for the future’ cultural sector Theme we set out in our Delivery Plan for 2021-24. Through the programme, we want to enable organisations to continue developing that culture of experimentation and innovation they adopted during the pandemic, both within their existing business models and through creating new ones.
We’re in the early stages of scoping the programme, but we think it will consist of two strands. The first will provide a small grant to organisations so that they can test and prototype innovative ideas. We think it’s really important that this fund allows projects to explore new ideas and change course as we test, learn and develop. What we hope people get out of this is an ‘investment ready’ business proposition that they can take to their Board, to other funders and investors or even straight to market.
Alongside this strand, we’ll have a complimentary fund that will offer more substantial grants. This will be for those ‘investment ready’ propositions – ones that have been fully tested and are ready for implementation or to be scaled up. Proposals should be able to demonstrate the impact they’ll have and how they fit with an organisation’s mission, but also that they’re a viable business model aiming to create measurable savings, efficiencies or new sustainable income streams.
We’re planning to have both funds ready to launch in spring 2023, once the 2023-26 Investment Programme has completed. We won’t be sitting on our hands until then, however. We’ll be using the time to do our own testing and will work with a small number of organisations to develop our thinking further and ensure that what we are proposing is viable. We look forward to sharing more details later this year.
The principle of Dynamism is all about responding to the challenges of the next decade, and the challenges we’d already identified in Let’s Create have only been exacerbated by the impacts of the pandemic. We know the last two years have been, and continue to be, hard for everyone, but we’ve also seen phenomenal resilience, skill and appetite from across the creative and cultural sector. Whether the pandemic forced you to embrace Dynamism for the first time or you’re leading the way, we urge everyone working in the sector to seize this opportunity and interrogate what resilience means, or could mean, for your practice. To help you get started, head over to our Investment Principles Resource Hub, where you’ll find a set of resources on Dynamism.
