Category Archives: Creative & Cultural Industries

What does the future look like?

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Digital Innovation Lab (job opportunity)

We don’t know what the future of digital marketing looks like, nobody does, really. You might say it’s all about touch or augmented reality but that’s already happening. What happens next? One of our latest projects will aim to find out by shaping the next big thing.

Over the next two years we will be working with leading marketing agency Clusta, to develop a digital innovation lab within their business. Breaking media firsts is a key part of what Clusta do; this project gives us and the agency a chance to build on these foundations and explore how we can make innovation processes the heart of a creative business.

Can you help shape the future of digital marketing?

The project is being realised through the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships scheme. We are currently recruiting an associate to work with Interactive Cultures and Clusta in developing the lab. The associate will be a recent graduate (or will be about to graduate) who will work day to day within Clusta establishing the lab, and eventually leading a small team of digital innovators, matching new uses of technology to client briefs. The associate will be supported by staff in the Interactive Cultures unit and User Lab at Birmingham Institute of Art & Design.

We are developing a number of KTP projects. If you would like to talk to us about how we could work with your business, through KTP or other approaches, please contact Annette Copper on or email .

Jazz Festivals Online

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I attended an event in Copenhagen back in March this year. It was organised by Jazz Danmark, a government funded body whose role it is to promote and foster Danish jazz. My keynote was about how musicians could use the opportunities of the internet, and it seemed to go down reasonably well.

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A Digital Britain for a Digital Birmingham

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On Tuesday 16th June the Government published the Digital Britain report. The report outlines the direction of policy in several areas of digital media from infrastructure to digital literacy. On the following day Birmingham held the first in a series of regional debates on the report. The event was organised by Digital Birmingham, part of Birmingham City Council, and featured a keynote address by Lord Stephen Carter who oversaw the writing of the report. Parallel to this “official” event, a 2nd Digital Britain Unconference was held at Fazeley Studios. Lord Carter also attended this event where he spent some time taking questions from the floor.

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Event organisation: Unconference

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Guest post by Elizabeth Short, an intern in Interactive Cultures department, currently studying MA Event and Exhibition management. She was asked to help organise the Digital Britain Unconference and is going to share some thoughts on how to go about organising one.

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£5k Don’t Come for Free

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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about policy and support for creative and cultural industries. In Birmingham a lot of support for the sector, as well as for businesses generally and SMEs in particular, has come in the form of funded business interventions. A few weeks ago Nick Webber and I had a lively debate about these assists, which led us to wonder about the value that the sector and the region has had from all of these interventions in Birmingham.

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Surprise Surprise! It’s the Custard Factory!

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Digbeth sign posting
Image CC Jon Hickman

One of yesterday’s speakers at the kick off event for Creative Metropoles was the Chief Town Planner for Oslo, Ellen S. de Vibe. In her presentation she had a lot to say about how town planning can create an environment to encourage creative industries, and help the city to learn value its creative industries. I was fortunate enough to be sat next to her at the dinner in the evening, and she explained a little more to me about here idea that cities needs to surprise their citizens and visitors, to ecnourage exploration of the space.

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What are the Creative & Cultural Industries Anyway?

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This week I am in Oslo at the kick off meeting of Creative Metropoles, and I will also be attending Kreative Oslo. I’m working on the Creative Metropoles project as a local researcher, tasked with identifying and writing up case studies of best practice in policy and funding for creative industries. Yesterday I spent an afternoon with reserachers from 12 countries, where we quickly realised that across Europe nobody knows what creative and cultural industries actually are.

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Creative industries, the ‘current climate’ and what knowledge exchange might mean.

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The last few days, weeks and months have presented us with a long list of doom and gloom as far as the economy goes. What has been happening in Birmingham and the region is making me, for one, feel like I’ve been transported back to the 1980s when the City seemed to have no rationale to exist so rapid was the decline into a ‘post-industrial’ condition. Today’s Birmingham Post reports the loss of 600 jobs at GKN while the situation at Jaguar Land Rover continues to concern us all. Closer to my working community, within University cloisters, discussion of projects is regularly conditioned by the phrase ‘in the current climate’, indicating the belt-tightening affecting us all.

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Asking Questions of 4iP

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4iP is a “public service media” initiative from Channel 4.  Described as a fund it aims:

to deliver publicly valuable content and services on digital media platforms with significant impact and in sustainable ways. It represents one of the biggest and most exciting calls-to-action for new and emergent digital media companies in the UK.
http://www.4ip.org.uk/about

If 4iP has a public service remit, it merits critical scrutiny in order to evaluate how far it succeeds in fulfilling its remit to people like me and you – the public.

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