Article
Posted on Tue 21 Feb 2017
Artful Innovation: the start of the journey
Artful Innovation™ was a five-day course to support small creative technology companies to examine their practice and strengthen their business cases. The Programme Director was Stephen Gatfield.
"I've learned more in the last five days than I have in the last five years of education."
Annie Zimmerman, Understory
Artful Innovation invited participants to enter into a task based journey of learning, sharing, building and evaluating their businesses. The course enabled companies to better understand their target markets, potential users and team structures, interrogate their values, consider brand and develop their business models. We examined case studies of successful start-ups, shared Design Innovation methodologies, learned about protecting IP and looked at different routes for finance. The course also explored mindfulness as a way of supporting team wellbeing.
The course culminated in a pitching session to a panel of business advisors and consultants. Each company rose brilliantly to the challenge, distilling their learnings from the week into compelling, convincing stories. There was a real sense of anticipation and ambition for what would come next. The learning arc from day one to day five of Artful Innovation has been steep and intense. The value of spending five days in the same space as colleagues, other start-ups, business coaches, speakers and mentors (mostly without emails getting in the way) has been really strong.
One of the common threads for many of the participants was the dilemma space between making money and protecting core values. Stephen kept reminding everyone that there are many different pathways to achieving economic sustainability. You have to make an informed decision on your primary audience, do lots of research, grow strong networks and find the right finance for you.
The key learning I came away with was the importance of storytelling. Know who you are talking to and what is important to them. The start-ups who win awards, leverage investment and sell products are brilliant at telling their story and emotionally connecting to their audience.
We are excited to see what the next steps are for the Artful Innovation participants. The participating companies are: Andthen, Noise Orchestra, Rusty Squid, Studio Meineck and Understory. You can read more about the companies and their teams here. This is the start of the journey for Watershed and the Pervasive Media Studio to support our creative community to develop their business propositions and skills in parallel with their brilliant ideas. We are committed to supporting economically sustainable practice within the creative sector.
The Artful Innovation Library
Throughout the course we have been growing a collective library of resources that cover topics from mindfulness to finance to business model structures.
Here's the Artful Innovation library as it stands. We would love to grow it, please share your favourite creative business resources in the comments below or on Twitter.
Books
Podcasts
At Your Service by Katie Shelly
The Business Podcast by The Guardian hosted by Coco Khan
Change for the Better, BBC Radio 4 Four Thought, hosted by Katz Kiely
Design Matters with Debbie Millman
My Career Crisis: work-life dramas and how to solve them by Rosina Sound
#52 Raising the Bar: industry drivers for diversity in industry by Gimlet Media
Videos
Clayton Christensen "Where does Growth come from?"
Yancey Strickler, Kickstarter CEO and Co-Founder
Startup Funding Explained: Everything Youn Need to Know
Articles
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
5 things I’ve learned creating digital things for kids by Sharna Jackson
55 things learned as a 19 year old VC by Tiffany Zhong
Websites & apps
Both of these websites offer a great starting point to structure your business model:
Mindfulness cen help with all aspects of your personal and business life. Rohan Gunatillake, founder of Mindfulness Everywhere and Buddhify has some really useful tools for mindfulness on the go to fit into your busy start-up lifestyle:
The business finance guide is a really useful online tool:
We would like to thank Artful Innovation course leader Stephen Gatfield and all of the speakers and tutors: Alex Fleetwood and Alex Bertie (Sensible Object), Greg Taylor (Elmwood), James Vaughan (Ndemic Creations), James Touzel, Lisa Urwin and Kiera Dale (TLT Solicitors), Mark Ellis (business coach), Mary-Alice Stack (Creative United), Dr Michael Johnson (Glasgow School of Art), Paul Archer (Duel), Rohan Gunatillake (Mindfulness Everywhere), Samantha Payne (Open Bionics), Susan Briganti (Swarm Vision) and Tracey Follows (The Future Laboratory).
We would also like to thank the beautiful venues we have used during the course. As well as Watershed we spent time at Triodos Bank, Ashton Court Mansion and The Forge.
Artful Innovation nominations were supported by MadLab Manchester, Glasgow School of Art, Makerversity London, Wired Sussex, Near Now Nottingham and Creative Cardiff.
Artful Innovation was supported by the Network for Creative Enterprise: Coworking Bath (The Guild), Knowle West Media Centre, Spike Island, UWE Bristol and Watershed. It is funded by Arts Council England and the European Regional Development Fund.