Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - innocult (Centre of Excellence for Cultural and Creative Innovations in Lithuania)

Teaser

Referring to the European Parliament data, operating sector of cultural and creative industries significantly contributes to the economic development by composing yet 11,2 percent of all private companies and 7,5 percent of all employees. Research data reveals that in Europe...

Summary

Referring to the European Parliament data, operating sector of cultural and creative industries significantly contributes to the economic development by composing yet 11,2 percent of all private companies and 7,5 percent of all employees. Research data reveals that in Europe cultural and creative industries\' sector more than any other economic sector attracts young people aged 15-29 which refer to 19,1 percent of all workplaces in the youth ranks. Following these tendencies, the establishment of such Centre of Excellence in Lithuania is particularly significant namely due to the lack of communicative competences between cultural institutions or international context. Cultural and creative institutions often lack communicative or analytical abilities, or skills to work with audience. Cultural and creative institutions are usually small-sized, thus lacking other competences as well, namely management, administration, project implementation, funding-search mechanisms.The new Centre of Excellence of Creative and Cultural Innovations is targeted to promote those links and contacts with diverse partners.
The project actively involves not only the researchers from Lithuania, Vytautas Magnus University and Kaunas Technological University, but the foreign researchers as well: the representatives of Politecnico di Milano share own experience accumulated in the fields of design and architecture, helping to customize the spaces of Kaunas city for the needs of the Centre of Excellence. Many activities of the Centre of Excellence are going to involve researchers from all over the world – the new institution will operate focusing on the global market.
The main goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a new and sustainable research infrastructure to foster and support inclusive and open innovation between creators, researchers and technologists that can help to shift Lithuanian economy towards higher value added creating sectors. This will result in promoting competitive business models, unconventional products and solutions and contributing to an enhanced understanding of societal needs made possible by a wide participation of stakeholders in the innovation process.
The main objectives of the project are:
1) Map the research potential of CCI in Lithuania;
2) To identify an operational and governance model for our CoE, based on a benchmark of the best initiatives in Europe in this field, and including HR management strategies and mechanisms;
3) To define a knowledge transfer strategy and scale-up services for creators & technologists, using co-creation processes;
4) To develop a marketing and business plan for our CoE and communicate our initiative at wide level and towards other sectors, countries and regions.

Work performed

From the beginning of the project, the organizers VMU has organized the kick-off event at regional level involving all the partners from KTU and POLIMI, invited the stakeholders from the ministries and CCI associations, as well as representatives from Kaunas Municipality. During the kick off meeting all the WP‘s of the project was presented and work division within partners was discussed. As well as the detailed regional information collection issues, definition of the full composition of advisory board, thematic groups and other outputs were discussed. The web page of the project was created. During the WP1 the researchers group: 1) Identified and linked the relevant local, regional and national organizations active in education, research and economic support of the Creative Industries; linked with national initiatives; 2) Developed research priorities for the Centre of Excellence. These activities were fundamental in the mapping and benchmark of the research & innovation potential of CCI in Lithuania, developing holistic methodological approaches and finding appropriate metrics to grasp the full value of CCI contribution to Lithuanian society, and establishing a research roadmap for our CoE.
In WP2 researchers promoted networking and collaboration within the project partners and with other organizations identified in advance, in order to use the best practices which focus on the active and productive operation of CoE in order to drive customer-valued results. In WP2 researchers defined the guidelines so that CoE would be established to provide support, guidance (offering standards, methodologies, tools and knowledge repositories), shared learning, measurements , governance.
In WP3 researchers worked on activities for implementing a technology & knowledge transfer strategy. In a light of value added by CCI, there is demand and thirst for external sources to provoke innovation, acquire new ideas, develop new capabilities and access the latest academic research. Therefore the main objective of this workpackage was to investigate the culture and creative audiences in order to identify, integrate and engage different social groups and their equal participation in cultural consumption focusing on audience cultural development. Considering the very competitive environments from which CCI belong and are surrounded, a specific Knowledge transfer strategy has set clear directions and means (in terms of tools and processes) to be followed for structured and consistent knowledge transfer for culture audiences.
In WP4 researchers worked on activities for development of a marketing and business plan for our CoE and communication services. In this workpackage the partners had used all the studies, intelligence and data gathered in previous work packages, and turned it into an ambitious while sustainable business plan for the CoE. The main result of this work package was the elaboration of the business plan with the support of the Advisory Board identified in WP1. Final forum was organised in WP4, which attracted researchers, investors, stakeholders, representatives from CCI industry, municipality and ministry of Culture. The new Centre of Excellence of Creative and Cultural Innovations ALICE was presented in forum.

Final results

This project was a unique opportunity to develop more inclusive, multidisciplinary, and thus productive and innovative approaches to the creative economy of Lithuania. The researchers had found out that the Centre of Excellence will serve for multidimensional research in cultural and creative field overlapping and merging other fields and sectors, focusing on a consumer\'s participatory and engagement research, simulating new scenarios and future trends. At the same time all conditions for the development of innovations will be created – operating hybrid laboratories will be assigned for atypical research and art experiments, ideas\' development, modelling and simulation. Market conditions are not favourable for novel and unaccustomed decisions to be spread out and implemented. Therefore the researchers would like to create an environment for irrespective experiments, cultivation and multiplication of ideas, establishment and development of start-ups and spin-offs.Project researchers would like the Centre of Excellence to be open in all meanings – it should enable emergence of non-standard ideas: links between art, culture and technologies. Those links are the basis for explosions, so, that\'s what we expect to have

Website & more info

More info: https://innocultcentre.wordpress.com/.