How does innovation happen? Enhancing society’s innovation capacity is essential for social prosperity and economic development. Innovations are sparked by challenging old ideas and practices and trying out new ones. This requires courage and creativity, as well as space for experimentation and reflection. Organisations of all kinds can consciously develop their innovation potential by strategically tapping into wellsprings of knowledge outside their established frame of reference and experimenting with creative practices. They can thereby learn how to increase the quality and quantity of new ideas they generate, as well as to evaluate their value and, most importantly, to implement them.
Inviting artists to intervene in organisations (businesses, public institutions, social organisations) is one of the most direct ways of stimulating innovative thinking and experimentation. Artists are skilled in engaging people’s creativity and they can disrupt the established routines, mindsets and management processes, thereby opening space for fresh ways of thinking and acting. Working with artists can help organisations re-assess themselves with new eyes and to question what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Artists have the capacity to grapple productively with uncertainty (and uncertainty is at the heart of the innovation process). People and teams at all levels in organizations need help in exploring the unknown so that good ideas are not killed off under the pressure to find quick fixes.
The Swedish organization TILLT has been active in this field since 2001. Over 80 year-long artistic interventions for innovation, (and 500 shorter) have been carried out the last decade. The effects have been raising the capacity of innovation and creativity in the public and private organizations. Since February 2012 TILLT has been one of the core partners in the European project KIICS, led by Ecsite, which will establish incubation modules by mobilizing creative and scientific assets.
By engaging visitors in science topics, tools and applications, science centers and museums are stimulating the taste for innovation. However, to empower the visitors to innovate, it is also necessary to foster their creativity: this statement calls for mixing the artistic approaches to science communication institutions. Could artistic actions make it possible for science centers and museums to become centers of society-led innovation?
This workshop will give a flavor of what artist-driven innovation can be like. We will give insight into the artistic process in relation to innovation capacity building. In an experience-based way, we will share cases and outcomes of projects as well as discuss the challenges in these kinds of projects.
