Sustainable Enterprise London Festival (SELF)

Sustainable Enterprise London Festival (SELF) was a cross-disciplinary investigation built on existing research by Adrian De La Court and Siân Prime. The outcomes were an online three week Festival, a short film made available on gold.ac.uk with foundations created for this to  become an annual event and a new tool for working with individuals and enterprise.   SELF was designed, developed and curated to understand how to build and support the capacity of the creative, social and cultural sectors to withstand the impact of a global pandemic and likely economic downturn. It built on Adrian De La Court and Siân Prime’s expertise and existing research, participatory methods, workshops and other enquiries into sustainability and resilience in cultural entrepreneurship. It interrogated issues of equity and inclusion as well wellbeing and financial sustainability.    Using a participatory design research approach, SELF consisted of workshops, talks, structured conversations and creative offers. The intention was to create a space for people to come together and be open about the difficulties, honesty and potential that is there. In so doing the project engaged participants from Lewisham, across the UK and East Africa as well as other regions and cities. We were able to reflect together through the creative lenses provided and input equally into the re-creation of a new tool. The skill of improvisation became consistently referenced. The final tool is inspired by Taleb, Eno as well as Cage and Cunningham. Bringing artistic improvisation to notions of enterprise.    SELF was online from 13 July 2020 – 31 July 2020, the programme included 39 creative and cultural sector presenters and the final documentation of the project is here.  SELF used a participatory design research approach to the development of a new framework for “antifragility” for cultural entrepreneurs and a sustainable enterprise ecosystem

Inspiring Start Ups

A toolkit to support people to gain confidence in creating an enterprise. This has been designed to support people traditionally on the margins of the creative economy, particularly people who are working class, or with other protected characteristics

Good Innovation Lab Tools (GILT)

Good Innovation Lab Tools (GILT) was a research project conducted by Prime with De La Court. The starting point was the hypothesis presented by Good Innovation that bringing charities together could lead to innovation in fundraising. In turn the research led to the creation of new revenue models and collaborative approaches for Third Sector organisations. Prime with De La Court researched to uncover common design principles needed for innovation in revenue generation for the Third Sector. Through participatory design research they were able to develop a series of tools and processes that are the GILT.   The research was initially framed in relation to a three-year project initiated by Good Innovation in 2016. Good Innovation created GoodLab to bring together a collaboration of leading charities to design new ways for charities to fund their work and bring new sources of income in to the sector. The groundwork, delivery and outcomes of the project led to the creation of new ventures by charities and alternative ways of thinking about fundraising. Prime and De La Court developed the enquiry with a review of practices of financial modelling and governance in the Third Sector and prototyped new tools to support the thinking and activities needed to develop alternative revenues.   Built on a notion that it was possible to repurpose capitalist tools that had been developed to commercialise Intellectual Property and innovation more broadly. GILT reviewed ways to transition charities in to new revenue and business models without replicating social enterprises or corporate models. GILT built on design thinking and co-design practices of Good Innovation and GoodLab; Prime and De La Court’s research synthesised practice and learning to find new insights that could be applied more broadly across the Third Sector and questioned existing notions of appropriate business models in the Third Sector

A toolkit of exercises for mentors

A toolkit of exercises for mentors in the CONNECT Programme By Adrian De La Court, Sian Prime in collaboration with Melting Pro July 29, 2019 Building and nurturing relationships is an essential part of an audience development strategy. One can learn a lot by being in a mentoring relationship, learn more about oneself and about the way you relate yourself to your audiences. Mentoring, as a process of both formal and informal transmission not only of knowledge but also of values, represents a learning method relevant to work, career and professional development in many sectors. Mentoring is a one to one relationship built upon trust and mutual respect

Employability Toolkit

This kit has been created by SYNAPSE, a programme that runs out of the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship (ICCE), Goldsmiths, University of London. The approach in this kit is to engage you with energy and creative curiosity to develop opportunities for your employment. Searching for your first job, your next job, or even a change of position can be daunting. This toolkit will help break the process down into a series of manageable and hopefully enjoyable tasks

Start-Up Toolkit

A toolkit to support people to gain confidence in creating an enterprise. This has been designed to support people traditionally on the margins of the creative economy, particularly people who are working class, or with other protected characteristics

Devising a Resilience Rating System For Charities & The Non-Profit Sector

One of the sectoral issues that COVID has shone a light on is that whilst social investors, grant funders and sector support organisations acquire detailed data about the activities they have commissioned individually, they do not have access to a similar level of data about the wider sectors in which they are operating. �This report was written in the first 4 weeks of lockdown in 2020 and developed a framework for assessing financial resilience of Third Sector Organisations

Coney: Better Than Life

We are in a period of significant change. The interconnectivity that the web offers and the quick rise of pervasive media has changed how we communicate with each other, how we access information, how we experience news, stories and the world. These changes have had a deep impact on storytellers of all kinds. The tools we use to tell tales are evolving, becoming more modular and tailored, more participatory and more engaging than just the printed word or the moving image. These new forms of digitally-enabled storytelling move beyond reinterpreting a text for radio or screen. We need to find new structures, and new relationships with audiences. Better Than Life, led by Coney, an immersive theatre company that specialises in creating new forms of responsive playing theatre, brought together an extraordinary multidisciplinary team involving award-winning interactive theatre makers, digital broadcasters, developers, multi-platform creatives, academics, VR experts, a magician and many more. We wanted to create a project that focused, in particular, on how live performance fits into the landscape of this terra nova. The aim was to see how to create an event for a large online audience that combined digital connectivity and interactivity with the liveness and shared experience of theatre. In particular, we wished to understand what kinds of agency and control audiences might want and enjoy when engaging with this new form of live performance, and we set up a system that allowed both audiences - in the live space and online - to participate in and comment upon the show in several new ways. A total of eight public rehearsals and performances took places in June 2014, with over 300 people taking part either in the live space or online. At the end of the R&D process there emerged a narrative of a new medium. The material in the R&D wasn’t normal theatre and it wasn’t quite broadcast and it wasn’t a game. It was a cultural experience that built on the live-storytelling and visceral nature of theatre, but combined it with the social interaction of MMO (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) and the delivery infrastructure of online broadcast. The show was held at a ‘secret’ location in London, with 12 people attending and entering the fictional world of the “Positive Vision Movement” (PVM). In the live space, the audience promenaded through the storyworld of the PVM, following three actors, playing, solving puzzles, chatting, debating and witnessing magic as they went. Online, people spoke and instructed characters, found commentary, spoke to each other, made choices and switched camera views at will. At points, the online audience could even take control of lighting in the space in order to create specific atmospheres, or shine light on a particular place or person. In every show the audiences were monitored carefully, questioned at various stages within the show and, in some cases, interviewed in depth about the experience. Interestingly interactivity - the ability to ‘take control’ of a situation, make a decision about plot or performance or change the mood through lighting or sound - was not rated as highly, by either audience, as the opportunities to socialise and engage with each other. Data suggests that the online audience, in particular, enjoyed the ability to form strong social bonds each other, and that they favoured elements of the show in which they were able to connect and communicate directly with performers in the show. This would suggest that this new kind of hybridised digitally-driven storytelling and play environment is seen first and foremost, as an opportunity to connect with others in a theatrical context - interacting with each other more as one might at a music festival or a house party. This is not then simply theatre with an online component bolted on. For the three R&D partners, the project was also a great ‘social’ success in terms of what we learned from each other. The project genuinely worked within the gaps of the knowledge overlaps between Coney, Goldsmiths and Showcaster, and we pushed each other to deliver a project with as many interesting new features as we could cram into one production space. Better Than Life explored what is possible - and proved that hybridised models of entertainment and performance can open up experiences to audiences that genuinely span beyond the geographic boundaries of a single location or building

Rise Up Summit

RiseUp has been dedicated to a key concept in the world of entrepreneurship getting more people to dare to dream. Reaching high, breaking the mold, and testing the rules brought forth by the experts of the past. Siân contributed through two workshops and a keynote presentation on how to successfully move from dreams to action

Inclusive entrepreneurship a roadmap for a more equitable future

Entrepreneurs act as the wheels of the economic growth of the country. Those that succeed can find themselves at the centre of disruption or as the next global spanning enterprise. Entrepreneurial efforts have forced new social, political, and economic changes, holding out the promise for new innovations. But the path to entrepreneurship is not always balanced