Crea-Tech Innovation Lab – Invitation to participate

Exploring real-world business and societal challenges and innovation opportunities that can be informed though collaborative projects that bring together various academic disciplines working directly with non-academic partners.

What is an Innovation Lab?

Similar to the “sandpit” format, these events bring together practitioners round the table with academic researchers under the facilitation of Creative Consultancy Future Everything to explore collaborative projects that could solve “real-world” challenges.

We are inviting organisations working within creative, cultural & digital sectors who are seeking to overcome a specific challenge or to develop innovative products and services, that could be informed by new knowledge, technology, or methodology stemming from academic projects. The University will curate individual groups of academic experts from a range of complementary disciplines to support each business and over the course of this facilitated workshop we will develop tangible project plans to pitch for seed funding to cover academic time to develop the project.

What do we mean by Crea-Tech and who should be there? CreaTech, as described by the Creative Industries Council (CIC), “is where creativity meets technology. It brings together creative skills and emerging technologies to create new ways of engaging audiences and to inspire business growth and investment.” CreaTech – The Creative Industries.

Creative Manchester and Digital Futures are two major interdisciplinary platforms bringing together academic researchers from across the university. Working with the university’s cultural sites, external organisations and communities, these platforms allow us to explore how technologies ranging from digital preservation to virtual and augmented reality can enhance access to cultural heritage, create new cultural experiences, and redefine the media and creative industries landscape. Some specific areas of expertise are listed at the bottom of this document.

Our School of Arts, Languages and Cultures is the beating heart of creativity and imagination at The University of Manchester; The School has a number of established relationships within the arts and cultural sector which have been fostered by externally funded research projects leading to impact case studies, collaborative approaches to teaching, and targeted cultural engagement and knowledge exchange activities. We are keen to extend our collaboration activity with private sector partners within these sectors, particularly where there is the potential for collaborative research projects that will inform real-world challenges or support innovation through academic input; key sectors of interest include gaming, music, publishing, digital media, and library and archive services.

Manchester Innovation Labs

How does it work?

· The Innovation Labs follow a facilitated process led by a creative consultancy.

· At each Lab we host 3-5 industry partners, working in teams of 4-6, with cross-discipline academic groups.

· We work through a dynamic, creative process – defining the problem and generating a range of solutions, before concluding with the optimal project which will be pitched to our expert panel for seed funding. There is a strong emphasis on jointly developing projects which have the potential to grow into larger collaborations.

What are the benefits?

· To engage in a trusted model for business-academic collaboration generation.

· The opportunity to secure seed funding to pay for academic expertise to help overcome your business challenge.

· University support will be available to develop seed funded projects into larger collaborative research funding proposals.

· Develop new relationships with university researchers with cross-cutting areas of expertise.

What do we need from business partners?

· We need you to share a high-level overview of the challenge you wish to overcome with the help of academic experts.

· Identify in advance, a challenge for exploration within the broad area of CreaTech; this could be a business challenge/question/or innovation opportunity where academic input could add value.

· Commit 2-3 representatives to attend the workshop on the day (5 hours), (to get the most out of the session we recommend you bring representatives who will be involved in overcoming the challenge if your project is funded e.g. technical staff if your problem is technical in nature).

· For private sector partners – be able to consider an element of match-funding (cash) to cover researcher time to conduct projects as designed at the workshop, this will enhance the scope of the project.

· Consider challenges with potential to develop into a larger research collaboration down the line.

Our Expertise – Our areas of strength include:

· Creative Industries and Innovation – innovative research that can benefit local areas, create new jobs, and advance the industries as a whole.

· Digital public and cultural participation including virtual and augmented reality access to cultural heritage.

· New models for media, entertainment and infotainment including Immersive and located games.

· Transforming physical heritage materials into digital versions for online storage, presentation, and analysis.

· Digital creativity and representing data visually in graphs, plots, charts and maps and extracting knowledge from the patterns and trends in large sets of text documents.

· Creativity, Health and Wellbeing – projects focused on the tangible health benefits of the arts and creative practice.

Interested? Here’s What You Need to Do Next. Please complete the form below and return it to [email protected]. We will assess your submitted challenge matching it with our academic expertise and should the challenge be shortlisted we will invite you to the Innovation Lab.

The event will take place face-to-face on the University of Manchester campus on Wednesday 18th January 2023 from 12 noon (arrivals, introductions and lunch) then 1230-17:30pm (ideation, scoping and project development). Details will be confirmed with the official invitation.