XR Stories as innovation and cultural intermediary for the creative industries

This paper extends scholarship on innovation intermediation within the creative industries, through case study analysis of XR Stories. XR Stories is a Yorkshire and the Humber based Creative Industries Cluster Partnerships (CICP) programme, focused on providing access to expertise, infrastructure and facilities to creatives working in extended reality. Through its exploration of the different ways in which R&D was facilitated, the paper positions XR Stories as an important cultural and innovation intermediary in delivering the aims of the CICP. It does this through demonstrating the varied examples of cultural and innovation intermediation which XR Stories undertook. The paper also draws upon Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, adopting the term ‘CICP dispositif’ to acknowledge the wider context of R&D intermediation within which XR Stories operated. It explores how XR Stories’s intermediation work was shaped by the CICP dispositif, including how it is constrained by CICP aims, but also actively developed new forms of activities outside of the CICP limitations.