Graham Hitchen provides strategic management advice on the development of major programmes for cities, cultural organisations, universities and government agencies.
He works with clients to manage complex challenges - specialising in relationship building, and high-level facilitation and negotiation.
I was inspired by Francois Mattaraso’s excellent post on the “theory, policy and practice of arts funding” to go back to my days as an administrator at the Arts Council, during one of the strangest periods of arts funding in the late 90s. Continue reading “Administration and power – a case study”
This piece draws on work being undertaken with Innovate UK, Arts Council England and the Knowledge Transfer Network. Continue reading “Thinking like a creative innovator”
The programmes being piloted by MadLab, Makerversity and NearNow are aiming to test an approach to the development and support of innovation across arts and technology. They are different takes on an ‘innovation-intensification’ process – providing space to develop and test new products and services, and guiding innovators towards a sustainable business model – including the potential for ongoing investment. Continue reading “Experimental innovation across arts and technology”
Choreographing local creativity
A colleague recently helped set up a creative collaboration between two friends: an architect and a visual artist. It took a couple of years to plot, and a few months to choreograph. It involved getting local permissions — mainly from land and building owners, rather than the local council. And there was plenty of other planning and logistics to ensure that the event — a sound-and-light show between buildings and across a couple of streets in North East London — was safe and fun for whoever bothered to turn up.
2000 people turned up! There was no marketing or promotion — just a flurry of emails and facebook posts a couple of weeks before. But some of these got picked up by local networking sites and a major on-line listing magazine — and suddenly they were inundated. Continue reading “Popping-up everywhere”
Hull doesn’t seem like the obvious place for a conference on digital arts – but it’s two years away from being the UK’s Capital of Culture, there’s a new digital media centre being established on an old quay, and a healthy and growing buzz about the place. I may not have been there before, but I left confident that I’ll be going back soon. Continue reading “Digital Utopias – imagining Heaven and Hull”
Big Data
Big Data is all the rage. High-velocity, high-volume information and statistics generating ‘infographics’ (which no-one seemed to notice before), data-rich annual reports and evaluations – and, of course, becoming the subject of funding calls. Continue reading “Whose data is it anyway?”
Guest post from Tom Campbell.
It is more than seven years since Kate Oakley and John Knell were commissioned by Creative London at the London Development Agency to write a report on the capital’s creative industries, based on roundtable discussions hosted by the Work Foundation. Entitled London’s Creative Economy: An Accidental Success and published at a time when public agencies seemed to be constantly launching strategies, visions and mapping studies, this thoughtful, sober, unheralded report received less attention than most. But, as is the way with these things, it now stands out as one of the few documents from the period worth returning to.
It seems somehow ironic that 25 years after the publication of the first serious study of the economic importance of the arts in the UK, that the Secretary of State for Culture should call on the sector to make a stronger economic case. Continue reading “The economic case for the arts”
Graham Hitchen 