HOW THE CREATIVE FUSE PROJECT IS SUPPORTING A DIVERSE CREATIVE COMMUNITY • 23
Creative Fuse North East (CFNE) is a collaboration between all five universities in the North East of England and is a multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder action project running until October 2018 aimed at exploring the social, economic and innovation value of the Creative, Digital and IT (CDIT) sector across the region. The CFNE Durham team, based in the Business School and led by Principal Investigator, Dr Mariann Hardey, has shaped its programme of support – called Bespoke – around the needs of businesses and draws on the research and professional expertise of the team on areas including digital development and social media, gamification, arts and creativity, creative marketing, pedagogy and workshop design, and funding and collaboration for small businesses. The project itself is not only novel in its engagement across the region but also in how it has benefited from an interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues in the Arts and Humanities, Culture Durham and the Business School to generate new opportunities and connections in the creative sector. The team – which also includes Ed Ruck-Keene, business development manager for Advanced Research Computing, and co-Investigator Dr Gretchen Larsen, Associate Professor in the Business School – has reached out to creative and digital businesses located predominantly in County Durham to explore and facilitate innovation and growth in businesses while being sympathetic to the individuals behind them. The resulting activity has established contacts with almost 200 small and sole-trading businesses in the region over the past six months, many of whom have had no prior relationship with the University. These businesses, on the whole, represent the team’s own ethos and approach to this work: local, diverse and unique. To effectively reach these often isolated and lone working businesses, the team adopted a dispersed approach by taking their work out to businesses and asking them for direct input into the supportive content being delivered. An example has been the work carried out at the Durham Dales Centre in Stanhope, a community, tourist and cultural hub in Weardale. The team not only visited craft fairs and shops at the Centre to meet local artists and businesses but also delivered workshops and drop-in sessions on site. This provided more rural businesses with access to the project’s research and teaching expertise. It is also becoming clear, based on the locations of businesses engaging with the project, that the creative and digital economy is well dispersed across the region, including rural or non-urban environments. Going forward, this knowledge will be beneficial for other projects, and it is the aim of the project to sustain the long term engagement between the School and University with more of County Durham’s businesses.
The uniqueness of the businesses themselves also features notably in the project. Engaging with such a broad range of commercial activity has allowed the team to unlock diversity at a human and local level. Diversity may often evoke notions of identity, and while that has been observed, the team has also identified that diversity within the region’s creative businesses also includes diversity of business needs and personal aspirations. Most businesses in this sector, especially in County Durham, are not the prominent corporations usually targeted by universities but rather sole traders who, by definition of being individuals, present their own experiences that entwine the business with the personal.
These creative businesses possess a range of life and work experience and authentically represent the diversity across the North East. They have to reconcile their needs as businesses with the personal journey that led them on this creative path. CFNE’s aim is to effectively link the University to them to generate new forms of innovation, growth and opportunity. Creative Fuse North East has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Arts Council England and European Regional Development Fund.
LINK Creative Fuse North East: www.creativefusene.org.uk
