Put performing art on the innovation map

Cross-innovation with performing arts is all about using the unique methods, creativity, and embodied practices of theatre, dance, music, and other live art forms to spark new ideas, solutions, and collaborations across different sectors.

By bringing performers’ skills in experimentation, storytelling, and collective creation into fields like technology, health, education, or urban development, performing arts help people see challenges differently and imagine possibilities that more traditional approaches might overlook.

 HERE ARE EKIP´S MAIN FINDINGS:

Based on the discussions with and input from participants in the Policy Lab as well as further refinement in a Community Review Workshop and background research, a series of recommendations were developed to foster cross-innovation with performing arts and tackle its challenges, key among them are:

• Acknowledge performing arts methodologies in innovation policy. Recognize competencies such as improvisation, embodied foresight, and audience engagement as valid contributions to R&D and innovation processes. This requires their inclusion in evaluation frameworks and funding criteria.
• Increase visibility of good practice. Move beyond small-scale labs and residencies by systematically documenting and showcasing successful examples of performing arts actors acting as innovators and brokers in innovation ecosystems. Make also visible the unique skills and competencies that performing artists bring in successful cross-innovations. Sharing cases and impact stories through conferences, platforms, and policy dialogues can inspire replication and raise awareness of the performing arts’ contribution to innovation. Invest in developing impact monitoring methods that allow for structured collection of (quantitative and qualitative) data and insights on the impact of cross-innovation with performing arts. Develop strategies for broad dissemination of these insights and their uptake into broader ecosystems.
• Stimulate existing cultural infrastructures to host cross-innovation collaborations. Encourage cultural venues, festivals, and arts centers to host collaborations with science, health, and business actors, and conversely stimulate innovation labs and research facilities to embed artistic residencies. Funding mechanisms should empower performing artists themselves to act as initiators of such experiments, drawing on their expertise in creating safe and inclusive environments, as well as support them in making the infrastructures visible as cross-innovation spaces.
• Recognize and support mediators. Acknowledge the pivotal role of cultural brokers and other mediators in building trust and translating between different sectoral logics. Support could include dedicated fellowship schemes that not only give visibility to these professionals but also help weave stronger cross-sectoral networks around them. Building a shared understanding, empathy and trust should be seen as core elements of such mediation.
• Promote structured intersections between performing arts and other sectors. Strengthen matchmaking processes on existing cross-sectoral platforms, facilitating two-way exchanges of methodologies and knowledge. Such intersections should be designed to foster sustained co-creation, not only symbolic or short-term collaboration. Next to exchanges in cross-sectoral networks, also actively stimulate demand from industry and innovation stakeholders through business and innovation networks, to increase bottom-up interest. Ensure stronger cross-links between cultural networks (such as Trans Europe Halles, European Creative Hubs Network or IETM) and innovation ecosystems (such as Digital Innovation Hubs or EIT Culture & Creativity). This alignment would provide performing arts actors with access to both cultural and technological infrastructures and support systemic openness in policy and practice.

Find out more!

Download the report with policy recommendations on crafts-led innovation in EKIP’s Knowledge Bank.

EKIP POLICY RECOMMENDATION:

Acknowledge performing arts methodologies in innovation policy. Recognize competencies such as improvisation, embodied foresight, and audience engagement as valid contributions to R&D and innovation processes. This requires their inclusion in evaluation frameworks and funding criteria.

In today’s innovation debate, the distinctive contribution of performing arts practices is still largely missing from the conversation.

”Yet, across the policy cycle we encountered many concrete examples showing how performing arts approaches contribute to innovation in distinctive ways,” reflects Joris Janssens, IDEA Consult and involved in Perform Europe.

As it score it begins with creating protected spaces for experimentation and failure, enabling embodied and experiential learning, supporting collective sense-making in the face of complex challenges, and opening innovation processes to active citizen engagement, particularly with underrepresented voices.

”And, in technological development, not only advancing and testing prototypes but also raising critical and ethical questions about the impacts of technology on people and relationships”

These practices go beyond simply communicating the results of innovation; they play an active role in shaping how innovation is imagined, tested, and ultimately governed.

”This contribution needs to be made visible, recognized, and integrated into innovation and cultural policy frameworks.”

 EKIP POLICY RECOMMENDATION:

Stimulate existing cultural infrastructures to host cross-innovation collaborations. Encourage cultural venues, festivals, and arts centres to host collaborations with science, health, and business actors, and conversely stimulate innovation labs and research facilities to embed artistic residencies. Funding mechanisms should empower performing artists themselves to act as initiators of such experiments, drawing on their expertise in creating safe and inclusive environments, as well as support them in making the infrastructures visible as cross-innovation spaces.

If the added value of performing arts practices in innovation is to be fully realized, attention must also shift to the role of infrastructures and funding frameworks.

“Across the policy cycle, we observed how cultural venues, festivals and performing arts centers can function as powerful cross-innovation spaces, bringing together artists, scientists, health professionals, entrepreneurs and citizens in ways that enable trust, experimentation and inclusion, ”says Isabelle De Voldere IDEA Consult

However, these cultural infrastructures are rarely recognized as legitimate innovation or research infrastructures within existing funding and policy schemes, which tend to priorities facilities aligned with scientific and technology-oriented research communities.

As a result, the unique capacities of cultural venues to host long-term, socially embedded innovation processes remain under-supported and insufficiently integrated into research and innovation frameworks.

Isabelle de Voldere argues that new funding and support mechanisms are essential if cultural venues are to assume a meaningful role in cross-innovation.

“Most EU and national cultural funding programs are designed to support artistic creation and production, programming, audience development and/or organizational sustainability of cultural operators.”

They are not designed to fund cultural venues as innovation infrastructures that host cross-sector experimentation, provide access and services to non-arts actors (science, health, business, and operate as (semi-permanent) spaces for inquiry, testing, and reflection.

”If cultural venues are expected to function as cross-innovation infrastructures, they must be recognized and supported as such across both cultural and research and innovation policy frameworks — and not rely on cultural funding alone.”

 EKIP POLICY RECOMMENDATION:

Recognize and support mediators. Acknowledge the pivotal role of cultural brokers and other mediators in building trust and translating between different sectoral logics. Support could include dedicated fellowship schemes that not only give visibility to these professionals but also help weave stronger cross-sectoral networks around them. Building a shared understanding, empathy and trust should be seen as core elements of such mediation.

At a time of overlapping and interconnected challenges, progress increasingly depends on bridge builders—people who can connect our siloed competences and spot opportunities between them. Their ability to link stakeholders and spark innovation is becoming not optional, but essential.

” The difficulty is to gain trust in a bridge builder who should ideally be able to have a neutral libero role without being suspected of going on someone else’s errand or of being after someone’s knowledge or IP, ” stresses Jesper Larsson, performing arts director and change leader in the southern part of Sweden.

Jesper Larsson beliefs that universities can play the role of mediator, but their slow pace and blurred mandate between research and education often limit their effectiveness.

” Therefore, a partly owned organization like Future by Lund, where business, city and region and academia have jointly joined forces, is an excellent organizational solution for where an intermediary could be organized.”

But if it´s going to succeed a new model for financing the “In-Between” spaces is needed.

“ This requires a new form of financing of a space in the middle, while at the same time one needs to be vigilant that a new power factor is not created with self-interest and increased bureaucracy as a result.”