innovation101

At festivalslab we define innovation simply and in two ways:

1. Innovation is making more of what you’ve got

This first definition centres all around the idea of assets and untapped potential. In a festival context, there are a number of diverse assets:

• - brand and reputation
• - reputation
• - convening power
• - performance content
• - access to networks
• - data
• - funding

Therefore a practical approach to start identifying innovation opportunities is to map all the assets an organisation has and then investigate how they could be made more of.  For example, all our open data work is based on the simple “making more of what you’ve got” approach of taking our core data asset – the festival programme listings – and enabling third parties to use them as an input for applications.

2. Innovation is the practice of breaking rules in such a way that creates new value

This second definition is just as useful.  The history of innovation is that of breaking rules…and we believe that a good test of how innovative something is feeling how painful it is to break that particular rule.  Incremental innovation hardly hurts at all, but radical business model innovation does…especially if you are wed to the old ways of doing things.

And remember that innovation is so more then just ideas.  Innovation is a process and it is the practice of making new ideas happen in such a way that new value is created.  And in the festival context, that value can be economic, cultural, social or public.

Due to the pace of change of digital technology and the seemingly endless stream of new tools it provides, digital and innovation are often synonymous.  festivalslab began as an extension of Creative Scotland’s digital development programme called AmbITion Scotland and therefore while it looks at innovation in the broadest sense it has a strong focus on digital.