Dr Sapsed has been building up a portfolio of research projects around good practice in managing innovation in the creative industries. One project for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is researching process mapping and upgrading video games development, working with eight of the leading games studios in the UK. Its focus is on how creatives and programmers can be brought together as a team to develop games. Dr Sapsed, with his CENTRIM colleagues, Andrew Grantham and Juan Mateos-Garcia, presented a session on this at the annual industry conference earlier this year.

In a similar vein, Dr Sapsed has been awarded an AIM (Advanced Institute of Management Research) Innovation Fellowship which is jointly funded by the EPSRC and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He will look at digital advertising and how creative types can work with account planners and account managers on online advertising techniques, including virals.

The project seeks to find answers to questions of how the creative process is best managed, how technical and artistic people can work best in a team so that a good product is delivered on time without people working round the clock.

Dr Sapsed and the team are also working with local companies on idea generation. He wants to find out whether and which new methods aimed at facilitating brainstorming actually work. The research shows that software engineering methods like Agile and eXtreme Programming allow people from various skills backgrounds to collaborate openly for short periods on a particular creative project.

Dr Sapsed has looked at companies which have been successful in getting their employees to work reasonable hours and meet deadlines. One way is through process methods like Agile. Another is through limiting people’s access to emails and the internet so they can focus on a given task more fully.

One of Dr Sapsed’s main research activities has been to lead the Creative Industries strand of the ESRC’s Business Engagement Project and to produce a research scoping study to highlight how higher education and business can work together to improve the management of creative industries. He and his colleagues have interviewed people in the creative industries and looked at the literature around business management of the sector and five main themes have emerged as being important. These include integration and disintegration, understanding how innovation changes business models and markets, the creative process and organisation, management capabilities and skills, and small firms and growth.

Digital tools, online distribution (for instance, of music) and outsourcing of creative work to freelancers or agencies have had a big impact on the industry. In some creative fields, such as architecture, digital tools allow modelling and experimentation which was not possible before. According to Dr Sapsed important questions need to be asked about how this might affect creative thinking and working. Online distribution has led to a fragmented market and although outsourcing to international partners can help with the management of costs for complex creative projects, it can be difficult to manage.

“The rules of the game are changing in the creative industries,” said Dr Sapsed, “but the new rules are not entirely clear yet.” He added that some of the changes will be passing fads, but others will be more durable. The difficulty is over how the durable changes can best be spotted. Another area where new thinking is needed is over intellectual property rights.

Dr Sapsed’s research goes right to the heart of what promotes creativity. Considerable research has been done in an attempt to demystify the creative process, including what makes a working environment which is conducive to creativity, but more work needs to be done on looking at how technologies and forms of open collaboration might help to generate new ideas.

One of the most urgent problems facing creative industries is over management. “Many creative industries promote people to be managers without giving them any management training,” said Dr Sapsed and few have any established career paths mapped out. “The training courses that do exist often don’t provide the kind of training that the industry needs.” In some cases other countries are doing better, he added and the UK needs to catch up.

Finally, Dr Sapsed said many creative firms employ a handful of people and it is commonly assumed that they do not want to develop past a “lifestyle” business. He is looking at ways government policy might be used to help them move beyond small-scale concerns.

At the Business Engagement Forum for the Creative Industries held in March this year, the results of the research scoping exercise were presented to policy makers, academics, business people and others and the ESRC decided to focus on new research looking at how changes in the creative industries in the UK compared to those taking place internationally.

THE CULTURECRUNCHThe UK’s creative industries have traditionally suffered from “a culture of crunch”, according to Dr Jonathan Sapsed of the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM). This means projects only meet their deadlines by employees working very long hours as they begin to loom. “Pressure and deadlines can be quite beneficial,” said Dr Sapsed, “but there is a crunch point and we need to find out where that comes, how managers can help to prevent it, plus when they need to step back to allow staff the space to work autonomously.”

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Dr Jonathan Sapsed