Below is a first attempt at the opening section of my article about user and open innovation in art galleries and museums. I try to set out what user and open innovation mean, why other sectors are looking to these approaches and why we need this approach in the visual arts.

I’d welcome your comments on any aspect – but particularly about how clear the arguments are, if it’s too repetitive or there are sections which are not useful (especially as the final version will need to be about 30% shorter), and if there’s anything you disagree with?

Here it goes:

From commerce to Obama’s election campaign and education and health, people and business around the world are harnessing the power of their publics – through user and open innovation – to develop new products and deliver more effective services and social changes. The language of ‘user-led’ and ‘open innovation’ may be new, but the principles are familiar as the authors of NESTA’s 2008 report outline:

There is nothing new about user-led innovation. Many of the products and technologies we now take for granted were developed by users – ‘ordinary’ but skilled and imaginative people know knew what they needed to do their jobs more effectively and decided to invent it themselves. What is new in this picture are the powerful tools that users can now employ – the digital technologies and networks that they can exploit to create further innovations and to connect with each other.[1]

Technology is the enabler, but the at the heart of these developments is a more open approach to involving others – customers, peers, intended beneficiaries – in how we do business. By engaging and involving their users businesses and not-for-profits are creating better services and products, and developing new business models, through accessing a wider pool of ideas and resources. Corporations, such as Proctor & Gamble have Open Innovation strategies because they recognise they can’t ever hire all the talented people in the world, they would still like to have their ideas. The new role of the ‘community manager’ is appearing in firms which value working with their users in developing, testing and improving products. As NESTA’s 2008 report highlights, user-led innovation is generating significant commercial value’ in the UK and global economy.[2] And this is a rapidly growing area, as global management consultancy McKinsey notes we have seen a 60% increase in user-generated content on the web since 2007.[3]

Speaking the slightly different language of ‘co-production’, and as part of the wider discourse of ‘personalisation’ in public service modernisation, those looking to improve public sector are talking about a new equality between professionals and service users to design and delivery to tackle social change.[4] Co-production is gaining ground within mainstream public policy as enabling ‘a major shift in the way we provide health, education, policing and other services, in ways that make them much more effective, more efficient, and so much more sustainable.’[5]

User innovation and open innovation are not terms widely used in relation to arts and cultural organisations, so it’s worth just clarifying what they might mean in this context. Behind the umbrella terms of user-led and open innovation, or personalisation, sit a wide range of models for involving users from consultation and market research through to more radical approaches such as crowd-sourcing or co-creation between professionals and non-professionals. This would include user-generated content (familiar in the mass forms of YouTube, flickr, Facebook), as well as production of entirely new products and services – such as the phenomenally successful iPhone application model in which third-party party developers have created over 140,000 small computer programmes (known as ‘apps’ or ‘widgets’) for Apple’s hardware. Open and user-led innovation can also embrace innovations which were not intended by the originator – sometimes benign, but sometimes problematic, as Tuomi has noted.[6]

So, at one end of the spectrum user innovation could involve simply being more customer-focussed, involving audience feedback in improving the services provided as John Knell suggests in his article about personalisation in the arts, its ‘simply asking arts organisations to sharpen up their act a little in terms of how they reach and manage their relationships with customers’. On the other hand, to cite Knell again, user and open innovation can be far more radical, ‘demanding more root and branch change in their [arts and cultural organisations’] core practices and products?’.[7] Knell helpfully divides user innovation into two categories which he terms soft innovation (effectively a strong customer-focus) and hard innovation (consumer as co-producer/ co-creator).

Most of us in arts and cultural organisations are probably most accustomed to talking about user and open innovation in terms of ‘participation’. In her recent book, The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon identifies three main types of participation which differ mainly in the extent to which the participant is involved:

1. Contributory projects – where ‘visitors are solicited to provide limited and specified objects, actions or ideas to an institutionally controlled process’.[8] Comment boards are a common example of this model.
2. Collaborative projects – where ‘visitors are invited to serve as active partners in the creation of institutional projects that are originated and ultimately controlled by the institution’.[9] She cites a project where visitors could vote on their favourite artworks in the Worcester Art Gallery collection, and where changing ‘Top 40’ were then displayed based on the public vote.
3. Co-creative projects – where ‘community members work together with institutional staff members from the beginning to define the project’s goals and generate the programme or exhibit based on community interests’.[10] The Glasgow Open Museum is cited as such an example.

But whether we call it user and open innovation, or personalisation, participation, co-production or co-creation, the underlying issue remains the same – across the commercial, public and not-for-profit sectors organisations are increasingly turning to their users, customers, participants to both design and deliver products and services because it can deliver more effective and efficient results. As one of the key proponents of this approach, Charles Leadbeater, has described the approach, organisations now need to ‘identify problems with people, and devise solutions with them, building capabilities that allow people to go on and sustain themselves’.[11]

So this poses the question, if we were to engage our audiences more closely in conversations about how we use our galleries and museums, could we become more relevant and sustainable? Why do we need to change, what makes us think engaging audiences could be useful, and what would be the implications for leaders – artists, curators, managers, education workers – in visual art galleries and museums?

Why audiences matter?

‘The crisis the arts are facing today is not one of funding, but one of relevance to our audience’
Ben Cameron, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

Many commentators point to changes in audience expectations and behaviours as a critical issue facing arts and cultural organisations in the next decade (Bunting, 2010; Knell 2006; Leadbeater 2005 & 2009, Cameron 2009, Holden, 2008). Based on extensive consultation with performing arts companies in the US, Ben Cameron, lists the four the biggest challenges facing the arts and cultural sector not – as many might think – as being related to funding, but instead as:

• Shifting audience expectations (largely through the internet leading to expectations of greater personalisation and largely free or low cost services).
• The impact of technology – including as competition for leisure time (with sales of video games now out-stripping sales of recorded music and DVDs combined).
• Technology changing the traditional model of authoritative cultural providers and passive consumers.
• The business models in the knowledge economy failing under pressure from online competition – whether that’s bookshops, pop music or newspapers.

Retaining and growing of audiences is essential for our legitimacy –particularly for those arts and cultural organisations in receipt of public funding – but also for our financial survival as earned income (box office and other visitor-related spend) becomes an increasingly significant part of our overall income in many cases, and last – but certainly not least – for delivering on our mission.

There are policy drivers on the horizon too, such as the localism agenda[12] including a Conservative proposal which would see local people able to demand a referendum on any issue, such as proposals to develop a new arts facility or the existing funding of a cultural venue. Clearly, with increased devolution in decision-making, ensuring local audiences are supportive of cultural organisations will become more important in future.

Where are we now?

Across the visual arts sector, we currently know very little about our audiences, particularly in contemporary exhibition galleries, and have insufficient information to be able to either serve existing audiences better, reach the majority who do not attend currently or advocate effectively for our funding.[13] Despite efforts to increase audiences for the visual arts, the evidence suggests audiences have plateaued for several years now at around 21% of the adult population.[14] The majority of galleries cannot profile their audiences currently, a significant number are not even counting attendance, and those that know anything about motivation, impact and satisfaction are exceptional.[15] Through the course of my interviews for this article with those working in, and with, the sector it is clear that many lack in-house marketing expertise and capacity, even in larger exhibition galleries, and only a few currently undertake qualitative analysis of their attendance.

In terms of our financial resources we need to find new income sources beyond the public purse and traditional fundraising models which serve only the larger, London-based, parts of the sector. Recent A&B research shows the vast majority of private income to the arts sector is concentrated in London (over 80%) and mainly targeted at performing arts organisations with turnovers above £5 million.[16] The part of the visual arts sector funded by the Arts Council (which includes the main contemporary exhibition galleries but also some production infrastructure – e.g. workspaces) generated the lowest percentage of its income of any artform. And recent research points to a growing dependency on public funding and a diminishing return on this investment with subsidy per attendance rising from £3.40 per visit in 2004/05 to £4.35 per visit in 2006/7 among ACE funded galleries. [17]

In terms of our human resources, we have a recognised shortage of management, IT and fundraising skills in the sector.[18] Visual art galleries and museums tend to be lead by an artistic director, with non-curatorial staff rarely appointed to senior posts.[19]

Clearly then, in the visual arts sector, we need to develop our audiences, financial and human resources if we are to thrive – so could working more closely with our audiences offer one solution to these challenges?

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[1] Foreword, Stephen Flowers, CENTRIM, University of Brighton, The New Innovators: How users are changing the rules of innovation, NESTA, July 2008, p.3.

[2] The New Innovators: How users are changing the rules of innovation, op. cit., July 2008.

[3] http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/rp/consumerdemand/ consulted 1 March 2010.

[4] Third Sector Foresight offers a useful summary of the key issues and debates in relation to personalisation and public services http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/personalisation-of-services (consulted 1 March 2010).

[5] David Boyle and Michael Harris, The Challenge of Co-production: how equal partnerships between professionals and the public are crucial to improving public services’, NESTA and New Economics Foundation, London 2009.

[6] Tuomi, I, Networks of Innovation, Oxford University Press, chapter 2, 2002, cited on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_innovation – consulted 2 March 2010.

[7] John Knell, Whose art is it anyway?, Arts Council England, London 2006, pp. 7-8.

[8] Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum, op.cit., p. 187.

[9] Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum, op.cit., p. 187.

[10] Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum, op.cit., p. 187.

[11] Charles Leadbeater, The Art of With, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2009, p.6

[12][12] Third Sector Foresight offers a good summary of this policy area with relevant links http://www.3s4.org.uk/drivers/localism-agenda

[13] ‘The data available on participation by audiences in the visual arts is scattered and the conclusions that can be drawn from it provisional. This places severe limitations on the sector’s ability to understand its current audiences and develop new ones’, Tessa Jackson and Marc Jordan, Review of the Presentation of the Contemporary Visual Arts, Arts Council England, London, 2006, p.55.

[14] Anni Oskala and Catherine Bunting, Arts engagement in England from 2005/06 to 2007/08 Findings from the first three years of the Taking Part survey, Arts Council England, London, September 2009.

[15] Burns Owen Partnership, Review of the Presentation of the Contemporary Visual Arts, Final Survey Report, Arts Council England, London, August 2005, p.30.

[16] Sara Selwood, Public Funding, Private Contributions and A&S, Arts and Business, London, 2008.

[17] Sara Selwood, Towards developing a strategy for contemporary visual arts collections in the English regions, Arts Council England, London, June 2008, pp.32-33 and Table 1.

[18] The Visual Arts Blueprint: a workforce development plan for the visual arts in the UK, Creative and Cultural Skills, London, November 2009, p.32.

[19]‘Often, non curatorial staff are not involved at a senior level,’ The Visual Arts Blueprint, op. cit., 2009, p.34.