TOROA RESEARCH PROJECTS

Gudrun Frommherz & AD Narayan (2021); Research Assistant: Rain Roque

Research in the Creative Professions

“By 2027, New Zealand will be a global innovation hub, a world-class generator of new ideas for a productive, sustainable and inclusive future.”

(Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment, 2019, p. 3)

New Zealand is a part of the most powerful creative economy region globally, which accounts for over one third of the global creative productivity.

The New Zealand economy exhibits a significant gap between creative potential and actual innovation outputs (MBIE, 2018).

The data of this study:

(1) ~3,000 job advertisements for media and creative roles between December 2020 and June 2021;

(2) A nation-wide online survey;

(3) Nine in-depths interviews.

Findings:

On-job research is a daily reality for creatives but is not regularly listed as a job requirement.

While employers contribute to creative education (e.b. through on-job training and internships), they do not significantly provide research training. Learning research skills is most commonly left to the individual creative employee — more so than creative skills learning.

The purpose of ‘research’ is often generalised for describing the locating of information, for professional development, and for innovation of creative outcomes alike.

Creative research most commonly occurs in conjunction to a specific creative assignment; there seems very little (if at all) differentiation between research for understanding the contexts of a brief (domain knowledge), research for generating ideas (ideation), and research for solving original creative or technical challenges (innovation).

Research does not usually involve the production or collection of original data. Internet searches are most common. Research is regarded a predominantly utilitarian activity towards solving a problem.

Accounting for time and effort spent on researching for a creative assignment is generally considered difficult. There is a wide perception that clients would not be willing to pay for ‘research time’. Research, if it is billed, is rarely itemised but worked into other project tasks or accounted towards the overall project time. Freelance creatives and SME find billing of research time more difficult to justify than larger agencies.

Creative research does not normally follow a structured research process. There is a perception that research is personal, individual, and not easily systemisable.

Although significant time is usually spent on research, research processes and findings are not commonly documented. Thus, the value of research is limited to resolving a specific creative brief. Reuse and/or transfer of research outcomes are not a primary concern and is difficult to action.

Creatives do not generally consider knowledge dissemination and sharing an industry practice. Competitiveness and lack of time were cited the most common reasons for individualising creative knowledge production.

“The core value of work in the creative professions is not tied to WHAT we make but HOW we make it. The process for arriving at an outcome is much larger than the outcome itself.”

Creatives reported that research would be essential and they greatly benefit from their research in subsequent work. Original development of creative techniques and workflows, optimisation of production technologies, and improvement of ideation processes were mentioned as prime areas of innovation.

Definitions of ‘research’ significantly differ across the domains of government/economy, academia and creative practice. New Zealand’s current focus on R&D emphasises the production of tangible innovation that can be economically exploited. In contrast, academic research emphasises the production of new knowledge, which may or may not be directly deployable in economic, social or cultural application. Unlike economic and academic research, creative research does not necessitate the use of original data, and it does not follow a systematic research process.

Preliminary conclusions:

Creative research is highly common across New Zealand’s creative economy sector and beyond, and a significant amount of economic input is expended on specific project-based research.

Despite a high occurrence of creative research activity, there is no economic value identification.

Research outcomes are not itemised and classified. Thus, creative research resources are economically unproductive — most R&D inputs to not generate measurable innovation outputs.

Nevertheless, creative research regularly generates innovation in form of personalised IP. Because the IP is not formalised, it does not create a deployable innovation value.

The overall productivity loss to unsystematic and undocumented research has not been quantified but is likely considerable.

Preliminary recommendation:

In order to close the gap between New Zealand’s creative capacity and the actual innovation productivity, creative research needs to be structured, quantified, and included into both the definition of industrial R&D and the classifications of economic innovation activity.

References:

MBIE (2019). Research, science and innovation system performance report. New Zealand Government, Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment. https://www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/1499-research-science-and-innovation-system-performance-report-2018

MBIE (2019). New Zealand’s research, science & innovation strategy. New Zealand Government, Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment. https://www.mbie.govt.nz/dmsdocument/6935-new-zealands-research-science-and-innovation-strategy-draft-for-consultation