Chapter 8: Play, Experimentation, and Proximity in the Creative Industries

The creative industries are often perceived as intrinsically creative and innovative, primarily due to the nature of their output. However, the size of many organisations may mean that whilst product innovation is part of their value proposition, process innovation may be more difficult to achieve due to time constraints and relatively small staff sizes. This can lead to short-term ‘survival’ heuristics rather than a more strategic approach to personal/organisational development and learning. Alliances are an important means to add capacity and build new competencies and foster new ideas, and creative clusters have emerged as an important means to develop and strengthen alliances in the sector. However, research has shown that many small organisations and freelance artists may struggle to adapt practices accordingly to connect with clusters which often have a high growth orientation. This chapter explores a case study of facilitated collaboration between academic and non-academic partnerships in the creative industries as a means to help catalyse transformative strategies for change and innovation amongst micro and small and medium sized creative enterprises. The aim is to understand how practice-based participants of the University of Leeds Creative Labs Programme perceived their involvement over the twelve years of its delivery and to propose a theory of creative collaboration.