The Cultural Dimensions of Innovation conference took place on 15/16 November in Newman House as part of Innovation Dublin 2010. The conference set out to promote and establish an interface between academia, government, business and the Irish public to foster the discussion of an important current social issue – innovation.
The conference was co-organised by the Innovation Research Unit in UCD CASL and UCD Research and kindly sponsored by the Arts Council.
The conference was opened by Minister Mary Hanafin TD, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport who was welcomed by Dr Philip Nolan, UCD Registrar and Deputy President.
The trigger for the conference was American urban studies theorist, Richard Florida´s pointed statement: "Creativity is now the decisive source of competitive advantage"! This statement addresses the societal changes that have just begun and will have a huge impact in the future:
The conference set out to analyse the cultural dynamics which will shape Ireland's economic, technological and political innovation agenda. Ireland must unlock the potential of cultural and creative industries to encourage entrepreneurship; move towards a creative economy by catalyzing the spill-over effects of cultural and creative industries in a wide range of economic and social contexts.
Innovation is usually defined as the creation of new, technologically feasible, commercially realisable products and processes. But innovation is much more than new technology. It has a strong socio-cultural dimension. The conference aimed at this dimension focusing on the cultural sources of economic value creation coming from science, arts and the creative industries.
The first conference day was about the contributions of academia to cultural innovation, exploring interaction and co-operation opportunities with creative resources from science. The second conference day was about policies for promoting cultural innovation, and the contributions of Dublin's creative industries, urban and artistic cultures.
Conference Co-Chair Prof Petra Ahrweiler (Professor of Technology and Innovation Management, IRU, UCD CASL) said: "Cultural innovation is attributed a growing importance for the economic and social development in advanced societies. A continuous increase in products or services with a particularly symbolic or aesthetic value can be observed in economic value creation accompanied by a strong growth in employment in comparison to other economic sectors.
"Creative industries are defined as combining the classical 'cultural industries' such as art, architecture, design, music, film and literature with 'new' creative industries such as advertisements and software/games/multimedia."
Conference Co-Chair Dr Aoibheann Gibbons (Director, UCD Research Development) said: "Cities play a unique role in this context as incubators of creativity, they are spaces for inspiration, experimentation, and cultural production. Urbanity means cultural and economic productivity – achieved by size, density and heterogeneity of the population.
"Looking at our surroundings suggests an intuitive illustration of this: Dublin´s history, achievements, potential, and people reach out economically, socially, and culturally and attract people from all over the world. We hold a competitive advantage in many areas and not merely in terms of economics. Technical and economic aspects of innovation have been studied in great detail, but the cultural impulses and environments that trigger novelty are still waiting for research and discussion."
The conference aimed at closing this gap by focusing on the cultural sources of economic value creation, while creativity becomes a success factor of the knowledge society – especially for countries that cannot compete in the low-cost production sector in our global world.
The Places & Spaces: Mapping Science Exhibition was brought to Ireland to complement the Cultural Dimensions of Innovation Conference. The exhibition, copyright owned by the University of Indiana, is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. The exhibition of key images from the collection was curated by Dr Aoibheann Gibbons bringing together a personal selection of maps for policy makers and those wishing to communicate science in different ways to broader audiences and the public.
The exhibition was presented as a public art exhibition at the Department of Justice & Law Reform premises on St Stephens Green for the duration of the conference and for the remainder of Dublin Innovation Week. The exhibition then moved to UCD Research where it is currently on public display in the building foyer. It is expected that the exhibition will be used selectively over the coming two years to highlight the power of the images, leading ultimately to exhibition during Dublin as City of Science 2012.
Click here for the full conference programme (PDF).
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