How to… connect sectors to kickstart innovation

Birmingham is finding new ways to connect sectors and link innovators across the city, as Patrick Willcocks explains.

Birmingham is home to over 5,800 creative businesses employing over 30,000 people, many of them clustered in two distinct quarters of the city centre; firstly, the Jewellery Quarter, the centre for jewellery manufacture in the UK, with over 400 jewellery firms as well as many other creatives including a growing number of digital firms, and secondly Digbeth, the home to the famous Custard Factory and other  shared workspace schemes such as Fazeley Studios, the Bond and the Arches.  The creative sector has seen employment growth of 13% between 2005 and 2010 and the city, through its creative city partnership, is committed to growing it further.

One of the main areas of interest is in seeing whether the skills and abilities of the creative sector can be used to kickstart innovation in the wider economy, innovation in private sector products and innovation in public sector services.

Three projects are currently focused on learning best practice in this field, all funded by the EU. This article focuses on the Cross Innovation project run by Birmingham City University (BCU) but the other two – Creative Spillover run by Birmingham Council and Clusters2020 by Coventry University Enterprises – are doing equally good work.

CREATING SERENDIPITY 
Cross Innovation is a partnership across 11 European cities including key creative cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm and Rome, aimed at finding best practice lies around four key themes: brokerage, cultural interventions, financial support and spaces.

Head of policy development for BCU Steve Harding says, ‘We are keen to learn from our partners and then to mainstream the best ideas. The university is a perfect space to test out methods of cross innovation, to encourage interactions and sectors to meet. We have the space to tackle silo thinking and the resource to put systems of knowledge exchange in place to clearly get information across about creativity and innovation in our city.

‘Birmingham has a strong creative sector and the university is adding to the creativity pool on an annual basis. It is in our interest to promote the added value the creative industries can bring to other sectors, to establish a healthy ecosystem of skills and talent in the city, cooperating between different sectors to address key issues.’

The study of Cross Innovation is in effect a study of how policymakers can encourage serendipitous meetings, encounters and interactions between the different sectors and how this can lead to innovation. This is vitally important given the UK’s and Europe’s current economic state.  There are a number of examples where such crossovers have happened in Birmingham and which show the potential.

ENCOURAGING INTERACTION AND CROSSOVER
Firstly Substrakt,  a small digital company located in the Jewellery Quarter has worked with a number of public sector clients to widen mainstream thinking about what is possible using new technologies. Its clients include the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the New Library of Birmingham.

Another example is mainstream TV firm Maverick (of Embarrassing Bodies fame), who, in a consortium with two other firms, has branched out further into the health sector and is now working with the NHS to break down the barriers between patients and staff on a number of projects across the country.

Similarly SAMPAD, a South Asian community arts group, has interacted with MediaLab Prado in Madrid to develop the ways it reaches its key communities.

Birmingham has tried a number of approaches to encourage such interaction and crossover:

• Oxygen Accelerator, hosted by the Birmingham Science Park, takes the best ideas and project teams from Birmingham and around the world  and puts them through mentoring and offers financial support for the best  ideas. Focused around new media, project teams bring a range of expertise to the table to develop new commercial ideas.

• Hello Business and Hello Culture are events-based approaches to boosting innovation. Hello Business spreads the word about the latest digital developments with audiences including the health care industries, manufacturing and engineering sectors, professional business service firms, media and digital agencies, offering advice and support from a network of experts on the latest in digital technologies. Hello Culture looks at how the cultural sector itself can develop using the new digital techniques. At a recent event it offered ten digital companies the opportunity to pitch ideas on creative and innovative uses of digital technologies that would inspire new collaborations, concepts, ideas, and business models in this sector for a £5000 prize to develop the idea commercially.

• Made in Birmingham, launched last year, is a celebration of design and manufacturing in the city which is emphasizing the importance of creativity and the history of its adoption in the city.

LEARNING FROM OVERSEAS
But crucially the Cross Innovation project is about learning from elsewhere and out of the many projects looked at two examples illustrate the possibilities for Birmingham.  One Netherlands based project is seats2meet.com, given a glowing write-up in Sebastian Olma’s book Serendipity Machine. It is a model for co-working spaces that has been remarkably successful in the Netherlands and is now spreading elsewhere.

Creatives are given free workspace, free refreshments and food as long as they offer up to help others with their skills. They are encouraged to interact with organisations that hire meeting room spaces. This model is effectively paid for by the organisations that hire the meeting room space and works financially. Research is underway to understand its wider impact. This approach has been ‘fanchised’ (no typo) and so could be adopted in the co-working spaces in the city.

Another really striking example is in Stockholm, where a number of higher educational institutions mix their students up on an entrepreneurship stream. These are students from academic, business, medical, technical and creative courses who are brought together to study entrepreneurship. This is certainly worth exploring, adding to the collaborative university work underway on graduate enterprise already in the city.

It is early days in the Cross Innovation project. The key question is how can Birmingham  encourage this interaction, how do you get different sectors to meet? It was recognised in a recent meeting of policymakers that, while the city has tried many new approaches, it needed a more consistent and co-ordinated approach and, while it is clear that the public sector can rarely pick winners in the innovation field itself, it can create the right environment for innovation and itself can benefit from it. Policymakers in Birmingham are looking closely at the results of these European projects to see if there are any answers for the city. Given the move towards far greater devolution of powers with the Heseltine Initiative and given the wish of the UK government to devolve EU funding, this project is well-timed to influence forthcoming decisions on local interventions.

FOUR KEY EMERGING LESSONS FOR POLICYMAKERS:

• Provide or encourage the provision of co-working spaces
• Sponsor brokerage events such as Hello Business and Oxygen
• Bring together students at an early opportunity from a variety of disciplines
• Work with a broad range of partners but don’t just talk

• Patrick Willcocks is a freelance European and Urban policy adviser; focused on European policy and funding, urban economics and competitiveness, creativity and innovation @globalbirmingham
• The Cross-Innovation Project:  http://www.cross-innovation.eu/