IAMCR video Conference Paper: Innovation Through Collaborative Audience Research, July 13, 2020

Innovation Through Collaborative Audience Research

In this paper Dr. Helen Davies and Dr. Bronwin Patrickson discuss the range of benefits and challenges encountered, as well as the workarounds negotiated during a UKRI funded, Audience of the Future R&D demonstrator project designed to further develop digital storytelling practice within the UK Creative Industries.  The Audience of the Future initiative has enabled the University of South Wales (USW) to collaborate with a consortium of creative commercial practitioners dubbed Fictioneers.  Using the popular Wallace and Gromit IP, the consortium will draw upon their combined skills in games production, animation, creative marketing and new technology development to create a location-based experience designed to propel new and playful identities for a traditional narrative media.  Using transmedia elements such as comics, YouTube videos and mobile tools, these enhanced experiences aim to engage new audiences and provide innovative ways for long term fans to interact with media favourites.  The university is providing research and development support for this collaborative effort through audience research, documentation services, analytic expertise and a space for reflection.
 
Cross-Sectoral Collaboration
 
Collaborations between University humanities researchers working together with the private sector have become more common-place, often motivated by funding initiatives such as the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Creative Cluster strategy.  This multi-million pound capacity building fund purposefully promotes research and development Creative Industry Partnerships as a way to foster cross-sectoral innovation. By providing opportunities for inter-cultural learning, student and civic engagement, as well as regional social cohesion and cultural capital development (Williams et al., 2017), these sorts of partnerships offer many potential rewards. 
 
They also pose a number of challenges.  Universities and industry are likely to bring different cultures, values, motivations, expectations, even different languages (definitions and understandings) into these sorts of collaborations. 

This conference presentation is delivered by the two researcher authors, Dr. Helen Davies and Dr. Bronwin Patrickson who take it in turns to present their individual contributions to this paper directly to camera.  This ‘talking head’ style is also overlaid and intercut with sample observational documentation footage of the behind the scenes collaborative development process including extensive audience research and Fictioneers’ own promotional preview videos.
 
References
 
Williams, A., Dovey, J., Cronin, B., Garside, P., Flintham, M., Smith, M., . . . Taylor, F. (2017). The Hidden Story: understanding knowledge exchange partnerships with the creative economy.