The power in enquiry

What are Knowledge Transfer Partnerships?

For over 30 years, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) have been working to translate the skills, knowledge and technological innovations within universities into UK businesses, by providing the funds to allow graduates to work within organisations with the full support of academic experts and university resources. However, if you work in an arts organisation, you would be forgiven for not having heard of KTPs, as the origins of the scheme in science and engineering have meant that knowledge transfer has been generally understood to be the introduction of technology into a traditional business context.

These days KTPs can be broader in their scope. Funded by the Technology Strategy Board, which in turn receives funds from the UK research councils, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the KTP scheme has expanded its definition of ‘skills’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘technology’ to include arts, media and social research contexts, and of ‘business’ to include social enterprise.

The focus of a KTP must still be on improving competitiveness and innovation for economic gain, but the opportunity to employ a recent graduate with the backing and expertise of a university is one which arts organisations should not be excluded from. The introduction of Short KTPs, which take from 10 weeks to 10 months, rather than the usual three years, also means that a more speculative and inventive approach can be taken to suit the ever changing contexts of the arts.

Beyond the KTP scheme, this partnership model opens up some potentially fruitful avenues for sharing research and support between higher education institutions and the arts which have continued to grow since the Arts Council’s 2006 report into the relationship between the two sectors. What Geoffrey Crossick referred to as “knowledge transfer without widgets” might provide a way of exploring the huge value in the working methods, social and critical understandings and innovative thinking that are at the shared heart of higher education and the arts.

How does it work for us?

Our KTP does not work with widgets. It looks holistically at the practice of A New Direction, an organisation which sits at the intersection of the arts and education sectors working strategically across London to provide opportunities for young people to access the best of arts and culture. The aim of the project is to uncover and explicate those working methods and processes across A New Direction’s programmes, which have developed under the rubric of ‘creativity’. These are the practices that are so crucial to many arts and education practitioners but are difficult to define and as such are often overlooked. The particular focus of the project has been the organisation’s year-long Olympic themed Enquiry Schools programme ‘The Biggest Learning Opportunity on Earth?’ which comprises 13 arts organisations delivering projects within 150 London schools.

The three core partners in our KTP include Dr Ben Cranfield, lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck; Natasha Silsby, a Senior Programme Manager at A New Direction; and core researcher Sarah Davies, who brings her curatorial and artistic background and MA in Arts Management and Policy to the project. The partnership is supported by Dr Kate MacKenzie Davey, lecturer in Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck who acts as advisor to the project.

Our approach to the KTP is to place Birkbeck and A New Direction on a level playing field, each partner understanding that without practice there is no theory and without theory there is no practice. This approach stems from our belief that the greatest opportunity of partnership lies in the sharing of experience to develop new understanding of our common goals and purposes.

The particular value of the partnership exists in Sarah’s role as embedded researcher at A New Direction. Playing the part of both participant and observer she can extrapolate process and methods as well as transfer and embed this learning through contributing to the organisation’s practices as an active full-time member of staff. The project itself is a piece of Action Research: while we observe the organisational processes of forming and working in partnership we are each learning about and refining our own partnership models. As we participate, observe and reflect we are uncovering the specifics of many intuitive processes and methods: the stages of successful partnership working, facilitation models, tools for embedded evaluation and the possibilities of experiential professional development.

Why embed enquiry in the arts?

By partnering with a university you can gain external support in undertaking a process of internal enquiry. This partnership is a call to action to share our experiences of education, facilitation, creative practice and artistic development in order to value creative processes as well as cultural products. There is power in the enquiry. To tell the world that you are looking inwards to better understand and respond to the outside world is brave. When we are facing uncertainty, asking ourselves what we do and who we are may feel scary, but may be the only way to take ownership of the future. What has become clear to us is that universities and cultural organisations, as places both concerned with emergent ideas and discovery, can work together to develop research that will help advocate for both sectors, at a time when advocacy is imperative.