Knowledge exchange

The London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange (LCACE) does what it says on the tin. The ‘exchange’ bit is between the arts and cultural sectors in London and Higher Education. Put like that, it sounds rather simple, so what’s the big deal? Well, language, time scale, priorities and, more than anything, the fact that arts research and development is not the same thing as academic R&D all present challenges for collaborative working. We are a partnership now in our fifth year of working in an area known in universities as ‘Knowledge Transfer’, or, as we prefer to call it, ‘knowledge exchange’. There are nine London universities: Birkbeck, City, Courtauld Institute, Goldsmiths, Guildhall School of Music and Drama (GSMD), King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London, and our new partner this year, the University of the Arts, London. One of our main successes is that we have grown from six universities in the original partnership to nine. We are fully supported by our partners; we take no money from the arts sector.

Collaboration
Our job is to encourage collaborative working between the sectors, where you might not otherwise expect it, either in response to academics or the arts. Over the first two years of LCACE’s existence, the development of support for the idea of knowledge exchange among academics was very much at the forefront of our work. For example, we supported a project on improvisation between artists involving the GSMD and the Nursing School of King’s College London, Material Scientists from King’s working on public programmes with Tate Modern, and the conservation studio of the Courtauld Institute working with White Cube Gallery.[[knowledge exchange in the arts and cultural sectors is acknowledged politically to be a valuable ideal]] We have supported over 50 of these small-scale projects, some of which have developed into longer-term initiatives such as the ‘Manifesto for Public Art’ developed by a Birkbeck academic, growing from an original initiative from Queen Mary and Goldsmiths. Similarly, we have delivered numerous information events, to encourage knowledge exchange, such as Collaborative Doctoral Award applications (PhDs which are jointly supervised by a university and an arts organisation), in which our universities are now very successful. We have also delivered key pieces of work on arts health and higher education, and work placements. We are now increasingly looking at how our academics are engaged with the digital agenda, and what this might offer in practical terms to the arts and cultural sectors. We also work very closely with umbrella bodies such as Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, London, The Visual Arts and Galleries Association, and the Association of British Orchestras, to inform them about collaborative possibilities, and we find that these events are very well attended.
Science lessons
Our most ambitious conference to date was ‘Culture and Consequence: the role of ethics in the arts today’, which was supported by the Cultural Leadership Programme. We brought together a mixture of academics and practitioners including Jude Kelly, Baroness Susan Greenfield, composer Nigel Osborne, visual artist David Cotterell, writer and producer Zina Saro Wiwa, and Matthew Taylor of the RSA, to debate a wide range of pertinent issues. The concept of knowledge exchange originated over 30 years ago in science and technology, when universities were encouraged to exploit their generated knowledge externally, and to make money for themselves at the same time as a result of spin-out companies or technology transfer. The idea that this could be transferable to other sectors took a long time to emerge. Even now, when knowledge exchange in the arts and cultural sectors is acknowledged politically to be a valuable ideal, we are still – both internally and externally – hampered to a great extent by the scientifically-based concepts and methods of evaluating what we do.
Research and development
LCACE and its partners firmly believe, like Professor Geoffrey Crossick, Warden of Goldsmiths, in his very readable address ‘Knowledge Transfer without widgets’ that “what is needed in the creative industries is not a system to transfer from one party to another some knowledge that has already been produced, to transfer something that has already happened. But, rather, the need is for a system to create spaces in which something can happen. In the creative industries, much of the time, once it has happened, it has already been transferred.” We believe that Professor Crossick was not talking about an actual space, although of course there are plenty of arts centres and galleries already on university campuses where academics and practitioners work alongside each other, and many other arts organisations like FACT which see interchange and research as part of their core operations. Rather, he was speaking of a meeting of minds or conversation, which may lead on to a more formal relationship, perhaps grounded in research. Essentially, the formal evaluation of this work, insofar as higher education is concerned, is largely about income generation, which is a pretty unsophisticated measure. At a time when the Arts and Humanities Research Council is increasingly being asked to justify the role of its research (see for example its recent work with NESTA on innovation), the role of knowledge exchange in research is becoming increasingly vital. LCACE has commissioned some independent research on the evaluation of the impact of its own work, and has produced what we hope is a useful model to inform the debate on knowledge exchange in universities. We have recently met with enthusiasm for this model from both academics and policy makers, and will be developing it further. The challenge is to find entry levels for the arts to engage with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), some of which are purely personal, some of which arise from networking and information exchange events, and we are increasingly running small-scale roundtables on particular issues. Recently, the London Development Agency has made some money available under a Knowledge Connect scheme for small and medium enterprises which have not worked previously with HEIs, which we are actively promoting. From small acorns…