Introduction
At a time when university finances are under extreme pressure, articulating exactly how we as university museums and cultural organisations contribute to the core priorities of our parent institutions, without losing our own identities, has never felt more urgent. We need, and want, to be more than a ‘nice-to-have’. As we make the case, each of us will strike a different balance between emphasising our contributions to research, teaching and learning, knowledge exchange, impact, engagement, civic role, widening participation – to name a few. This blog, based on a UMG 2025 conference presentation, asks what happens if we seek to make innovation a key part of our positioning? How can we demonstrate our distinctive potential to catalyse new approaches? How does aligning ourselves with an innovation agenda impact what we do, and how we are perceived?
Lancaster Arts, a university-based combined arts organisation that includes an accredited museum (the Peter Scott Gallery), has been exploring these possibilities in recent years. Our UMG 2025 presentation shared what this has looked like, and where it might be taking us, as a starting point for wider discussion about the potential benefits, and risks, of making innovation a core part of our identity and our contribution.
For us, aligning ourselves with innovation helps emphasise the importance of ideas in driving what we do, in keeping with our organisational tag line ‘where ideas, people and places connect’. Innovation also helps makes clear the interdisciplinary nature of our activity and the fact that we are open to collaboration with researchers across and beyond the university, challenging assumptions that our potential to partner and contribute is restricted to arts or humanities disciplines. Highlighting innovation also makes strategic sense, working within a university that centres innovation in terms of how it articulates its institutional vision:
‘Our Vision is to be a university that is globally significant – a sector leader and innovator that delivers the highest quality research, teaching and student experience, and that engages locally, nationally, and internationally.’
What might creating the conditions for innovation look like?
While innovation runs through our different programme strands, these short examples share two of the activity strands through which we proactively seek to create the conditions for innovation:
Case study 1: Creative residencies
Each year, we run a number of week-long residencies, designed to create time and space to innovate and test ideas. Increasingly, these involve both artists and academics, catalysing creative collaborations around a given theme or question. Both artists and researchers apply to take part. Each residency enables a phase of exploration, for mutual benefit, taking the form of conversations, mini residencies within an academic department or field trips with one or more researchers within the residency period, as well as time to reflect and develop ideas with the support of the Lancaster Arts team, often making use of our theatre and gallery spaces. Our most recent one explored the theme of Land from various perspectives. The importance of creating these spaces for the generation of ideas is highlighted in the following artist reflection:
‘An invitation to be risky and risqué can be rare within institutional, educational and collections orientated spaces …To be able to play as queer people feels necessary and to be supported to explore mutual benefit in how the structure of the residency developed, was essential to navigating its purpose – of rest, of reimagination and of how we can generate ideas, rather than how we should do things as currently understood methods.’ (residency artist reflection)
Case study 2: Creative gatherings
Creative Gatherings are meeting spaces with a difference, bringing together a diverse range of people, from a variety of backgrounds, interests and sectors, to investigate themes of interest, through creative or artistic practices. They offer:
- A forum that brings together people who share an interest, expertise or lived experience in a theme.
- A facilitated space using arts-based and/ or imaginative group-based activities created to deepen both experiences and conversations on the theme.
- A very different dynamic to traditional meetings or consultative events. The creative techniques are designed to build trust, with open communication that nurture new ways of thinking and working.
We typically run three Creative Gatherings each year, bringing together artists, researchers and those with relevant lived experiences to expand their ways of thinking about particular themes or questions by exploring creatively together. These may act as catalyst for future research, action or collaboration.
What happens when we make the case?
So, how has all this messaging around innovation landed? Has it made a difference to how our work is understood by stakeholders within the university? In some ways, the answer is a positive one. In 2024, Lancaster University commissioned an external consultant to undertake a strategic review of Arts and Culture. Excitingly, we found that the notion that arts and culture could have a central role in driving and enabling innovation had come through loud and clear – presumably partially, though of course not exclusively, as a result of the emphasis we place upon this dimension of Lancaster Arts activity. The university is now in the process of adopting a new strategy, ‘Cultivate’, which is described as a ‘cultural innovation’ framework, defining cultural innovation as the use of artistic and cultural practices to generate new ideas, frameworks, and solutions for societal and environmental challenges. We are looking forward to seeing where this leads and what it means for our work.
It is early days in terms of understanding how Cultivate will play out on the ground, but the framing and pilot activity so far suggest a commitment to partnership activity encompassing academics, artists and a wide range of partners within and beyond the university. Leadership of the strategic initiative overall, however, has been firmly situated within the academic parts of the university, as opposed to being shared between academics and those with deep professional expertise. Does this matter? For me, it prompts a niggling cautionary note: innovation may be both central to how we contribute and a helpful way of positioning that contribution, but will our host institutions ever truly believe it can happen in spaces beyond academic departments? We’re hopeful that moving forward, there will continue to be space to demonstrate that innovation is best served by bringing together, on an equal footing, different ways of thinking and different practices when it comes to generating knowledge.
Miranda Stearn, Curator
Lancaster Arts, Lancaster University
