PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH AND THE INNOVATION AGENDA:

BEYOND THE POSTGRADUATE DEGREE IN THE ARTS,

DESIGN AND MEDIA.

Dr Luke Jaaniste
Research Fellow,
Creative Industries Faculty, QUT

Prof Brad Haseman

Assistant Dean (Research),
Creative Industries Faculty, QUT

The rise of the ‘practice-led’ research approach has given us a new way of
understanding what creative practice in art, design and media can do in the academy
and the world— it can materialise new ideas and forms into being as a form of
experimental research. Yet, to date, attention around the world, and especially in
Australia, has been chiefly directed at the postgraduate research degrees, most
notably the PhD or doctoral equivalents. Recent mapping projects and surveys of
practice-led research in Australia reveal much about the institutional conditions of
higher degree researchers, supervisors, examiners and research training (Baker et al
2009; Evans et al 2003; Dally et al 2004; Paltridge et al 2009; Phillips et al 2009).
Given this focus, we might well ask: is the practice-led approach destined to be a
part of the higher degree ghetto only, or does it have an afterlife? What is the place
of ‘practice-led’ beyond the postgraduate degree? After all postgraduate researchers
do not remain postgraduates forever, and perhaps the practice-led approach to
research may have benefits in wider university, professional and communal contexts.

If we are to consider practice-led research in the wider world then the meta-language
of contemporary innovation is an important resource; the framework of innovation
and the innovation agenda emerged as a direct response to connecting research and
knowledge to economic, social and educational development. For sure, innovation
theory and policy has been historically locked up in science and technology, but it
does not have to be, and stripped of its disciplinary biases, the expanded
contemporary view of innovation is a powerful explanatory tool. But first, some back-
story will help set the scene of the innovation of practice-led research.

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SWEEPING CHANGES IN EDUCATION, MEDIA AND KNOWLEDGE:
THE RISE OF PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, DESIGN AND MEDIA

Given that the practice-led approach in arts, design and media production is so
different to the established traditions of research, how did it gain entry into the ranks
of higher research at all? A number of reasons can be identified.

Firstly it is symptomatic of the profound changes in the tertiary education system in

the late twentieth century. In Australia, existing specialist art and design colleges
were incorporated into university faculties as part of the ‘unified national systems’ of
universities that formed part of the Dawkins reforms in the early 1990s (SERCAC
1995; Strand 1998). With these amalgamations, research pathways were opened up
for both the academics and students who produce art, design and media. Research
postgraduate degrees became a growth area, and more and more seen as useful
and even necessary addition to tertiary-level education. Besides giving students
more years to hone their craft and ideas in stimulating and protected educational
environments, surely another reason was more pragmatic. Generally speaking,
postgraduate research degrees are free for students whilst non-research
postgraduate courses attract significant fees. Access to postgraduate research
scholarships is an even greater financial incentive; the three-to-four years full-time
stipend that a PhD candidate receives to carry out in-depth creative exploration and
presentation is far greater and more constant than that which can be gained through
such avenues as arts and cultural grants, and relieves many from the strain of a day
job. For studio-based art, design and media academics, research pathways have
been driven as much by career pressures (competing with humanities and theory
scholars who already had PhD-level qualifications and research acumen) as by the
desire to have the time to spend on their creative practice validated (and
remunerated) by the academy. How easily this works in practice and fits in with
already heavy workloads remains a going concern for many educators.

A second reason for the rise of practice-led research in arts, design and media
faculties within universities relates to advances in technologies for the documentation
and distribution of creative rich-media works. In the 1990s, the further advancement,
diversification and accessibility of digital tools and the emergence of the internet with
its ever-widening bandwidth meant that the rich-media, non-print objects and events

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of the creative sector could be far more effectively documented, archived, distributed,
compared and measured. This is an important point, since academic research
involves the dissemination of research outcomes within a peer community and wider
general public. The creative sector still has nothing like the citation indexes of
scientific research community at its disposal, but so much more is now possible than
before in the pre-digital, pre-online past.

A third reason for the rise of practice-led research concerns its very difference from
traditional academic research; it is part of widening the scope of what is now
accepted as useful, worthy types of knowledge in the university that has been fueled
by increasing suspicions around the privileging of logo-centric knowledge. Over the
past fifty years challenges to the established order of epistemology have come
increasingly from the social sciences, the qualitative research community, and the
paradigm wars looking beyond the positivist tradition of analytical written knowledge.
Coinciding with the questioning of traditional forms of knowledge has been the
recognition of professional and everyday practices within the gamut of academic
research. There is a clear practice-imperative to be found in socially-engaged
research methods such as action research, the establishment of practice-based
research centres within professional workplaces such as hospitals and clinics, the
analysis and use of reflective practitioner dynamics, and the increasing demand for
universities to commercialise the outcomes of their research often through external
partnerships. Practice-led research in the creative sector inserts practice into
research by offering creative works, designs, content and events as core research
outputs, and the processes and practices involved as core research methods.
Creative production is the central research activity, rather than something to be
merely observed or assisted.

Given this history, what now for practice-led research? How and where will it travel,
and what becomes of the practice-led researchers trained in this methodology? Is it
bound to exist forever as a niche higher degree? Surprisingly perhaps for some, one
way of understanding and enlivening the future for practice-led research lies in tying
it to the national innovation agenda: namely to leverage it as a core element within
the larger innovation ecosystem.

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THE INNOVATION AGENDA

Most broadly, the innovation agenda refers to the growing desire of governments and
communities to change and improve our human existence through the creation and
application of new ideas. Innovation is what is needed to solve our current and future
problems and capitalise on our opportunities. That’s the big vision of innovation.
More specifically, innovation is understood through the innovation policy
development of national governments and multi-national institutions such as the
European Union and the OECD. And innovation policy is big business. It leverages
billions of dollars of public investment in the people, organisations and dynamics of
innovation – the European Union is contributing 50 billion Euros to innovation
programs during 2007-2013 (Kern 2007), and under Prime Minister Howard,
Australia saw over 6 billion dollars committed through the Backing Australia’s Ability
strategy (Commonwealth of Australia 2001, 2004).

Not everyone, however, has been welcomed into the innovation agenda. Whilst we
will seek to show how the innovation agenda can embrace the creative sector, those
responsible for building innovation systems have seldom bothered with creative
artists and researchers. This is not that surprising, given the historical providence of
innovation policy and theory that reaches back to the Post-War nation-building period
when ‘big science’ was seen to be the key to improving the human condition (NESTA
2008: 1). Innovation policy has emerged out of science, technology, industry and
economic policy (OECD 2005: 15), and similarly mainstream innovation studies are
often considered a sub-set of science-and-technology studies. In this narrow
formulation, innovation policy and theory has focused on scientific knowledge,
manufactured technologies and their commercial application; it has been concerned
almost entirely with the STEM sector (science-technology-engineering-medicine) and
in so doing it has excluded many disciplines, practices and alternative worldviews.

While techno-science and economic rationalism has dominated the scene, we would
argue that the innovation agenda has the potential to point to issues of deep
importance to us all: how we all change and grow locally and globally. And now there
are clear signs that the innovation agenda is expanding. Those writing the official
innovation story (the innovation theorists and policy-makers) are looking to add more
chapters to the narrative, embracing more types of human practices than those found

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in science and technology. Heads of government (Barroso 2006a, 2006b; Prime
Minister Rudd quoted in Cutler and Company 2008: 47; Carr 2008) have made
pronouncements about the need to include the HASS sector (humanities-arts-social
sciences). Innovation theorists have begun to look at inter-disciplinary innovation
models and there is increasing advocacy and research by those from the creative
industries, HASS, arts and design domains, most recently stimulated in Australia
around the 2008 Review of the National Innovation System (RNIS) which led to the
Venturous Australia report. Even if some from the research sector in the humanities
and arts have been put off by innovation talk, it is important to realise that the
innovation agenda is the coordinating force driving the institutional and regulatory
changes around research across all discipline areas, because research is taken to
be a vitial component of innovation. Thus, a discussion about the past, present and
future agency of practice-led research can gain much from being grounded in the key
concepts that underwrite the innovation agenda.

AN EXPANDED FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING INNOVATION

Before developing connections between practice-led research and innovation it is

necessary to map a framework of innovation. This is drawn from basic concepts
mapped out in major innovation reports in Australia, most notably the recent
Venturous Australia report (Cutler and Company 2008), which underwrite
contemporary innovation policy and theory. The framework outlines all the major key
concepts and dynamics of innovation, which goes well beyond commercial
applications (also taken up in Haseman & Jaaniste 2008 and Jaaniste 2009a).

At the heart of innovation is a three-stage trajectory, or cycle, that has its heritage in
the mid-twentieth-century economic theories of Schumpeter (OECD 2005: 29). It
involves: (1) knowledge production – creating and producing knowledge, whether
curiosity-driven (‘pure research’) or directed towards practical problems (‘applied
research’ or ‘R&D’); (2) knowledge application – applying new knowledge to practical
situations for commercial profit (‘commercialisation’) and social development
(‘utilisation’); and (3) knowledge diffusion – the spread of new knowledge and
applications across the economy and society until it is absorbed into our evolving
way of life.

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These processes of innovation are supported by a cultural and educational backdrop.
The culture or ‘atmosphere’ of innovation provides and supports the impetus for all to
engage in innovation, from creators through to consumers and citizens, by
encouraging risk-taking, experimentation and enterprise. Innovation is also supported
by the education system, which, it is hoped, fosters the skills and aptitudes of
tomorrow’s innovators—educating for an innovative workforce and community.

Connected to both the innovation trajectory and supporting backdrop is the

innovation system itself. This is the complex network of knowledge, products,
processes, people and organisations that together make innovation possible (see
OECD 1997 for a detailed overview of the National Innovation Systems approach).
Types of organisations in the innovation system include universities, research
institutes, businesses and commercial firms and third sector organizations. What is of
interest here is not just the components of the system but also the interactions and
movements of knowledge, skills and people throughout the systems; innovation
systems thinking is concerned with stocks and flows. The systemic support provided
by government in the form of regulations and resources is also an important
consideration.

We represent the various elements of the innovation framework as an expanding

trajectory with feedback loops (Figure 1), encapsulating the trajectory-like and cycle-
based diagrams of Cutler (2008: 22-23):

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 Figure 1: the contemporary framework of innovation

THE CURRENT PLACE OF PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH

As a species of research, and because of its growth in the postgraduate domain,

practice-led research contributes to the knowledge production phase of the
innovation trajectory. Creative practitioners are knowledge creators, producing new
concepts, methods and material outputs (an argument made in Australia at the
national policy level since SERCAC 1995; Strand 1998; AAH 1998), albeit with its
own paradigmatic inflections (such as Gray et al 1995; Press 1995 and more recently
Haseman 2006; Haseman & Mafe 2009; Biggs & Büchler 2009; Büchler et al 2009).
Practice-led research might be ‘pure/basic’, focused on esoteric and experimental
issues beyond any practice consideration, or it might be very ‘applied/strategic’,
addressing practical problems and community needs. Thus, arts, design and media
producers are already playing a part in the innovation cycle and system, by creating

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new ideas then by documenting and disseminating them across professional and
social networks. In short, practice-led research has been a frontier territory for
reconsidering the ways that artists, designers and media-makers can contribute to
the innovation ecosystem – not just as users of science-and-technology innovation,
but as creators and researchers of innovative cultural products and processes.

Over the last decade, various advocates have sought to position their artform as an
R&D engine for the wider arts sector (see Haseman & Jaaniste 2008: 23-24 for a
summary of the Australian situation). Most notably, new media arts has been argued
as producing R&D around digital, high-tech and science-based engagements,
whether linked to universities or not (Australia Council 1999, Australia Council et al.
2005: 10-12) whilst other artforms discussed in terms of R&D include the small-to-
medium performing arts sector, contemporary visual arts, or digital content creation.
But such pronouncements are usually not backed-up by any detailed examination of
what such claims to research might mean in practice.

In Australia, most of the energy and conversation around the specificities of practice-
led research concerns the postgraduate research higher degree—to the induction of
creative practitioners into the research sector at the knowledge production phase of
the innovation cycle. There is a simple reason for this: practice-led research is an
acceptable model at the higher degree level, with postgraduate scholarships flowing,
yet practice-led research methods and outputs are not funded, nor counted, at the
level of national research funding for academic research staff. True, the latest
incarnation of ERA seeks to rectify some of this imbalance, but this is only a
beginning. (The UK situation is a little different, because postdoctoral research
funding for creative practitioners and the auditing of creative outputs as part of
national research surveys are meditated by the AHRC—the Arts and Humanities
Research Council established in 2005—rather than a single generic research council
as is the case for Australia.)

BEYOND THE POSTGRADUATE DEGREE

We argue that practice-led research can play a larger role in the innovation system,
rather than merely being contained and captured within the accreditation system for
higher degree research candidates. Firstly, practice-led research already is, and can

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become a far greater, force within the arts, design and media professions. A certain
proportion of makers, producers and citizens have long been interested in
exploratory and experimental approaches to techniques, forms, presentation formats
and distribution platforms. The research practice-led discourse can help to highlight
and give agency to these innovative developments in culture. Secondly, the practice-
led approach has a strong potential for social and commercial application, within and
beyond universities. User-led design, community cultural development, arts
therapies, applied arts and design, and media activism can fuel social innovation.
Likewise, market-driven, user-centric, commercially engaged work can fuel economic
development, as has been championed by those who have mapped and advocated
for the creative industries over the last decade. Such applications can occur through
those working in the ‘creative sector’ as well as those ‘embedded’ within other
sectors and professions (cf Cunningham & Higgs 2009). Thirdly, the diffusion of
practice-led research also needs to be considered, in relation to the spread of the
innovative people, products and processes developed through practice-led research,
and the spread of the practice-led methodology itself.

In light of this, further scoping studies and sector research projects need to move
beyond issues of higher degree research. We now know a good deal about the
institutional conditions of higher degree researchers, supervisors, examiners and
research training (Baker et al 2009; Evans et al 2003; Dally et al 2004; Paltridge et al
2009; Phillips et al 2009), but what happens to researchers and their research once
that have completed their degrees? Further sector-wide research needs to collect
and analysise evidence around:

• Flows of methodologies: What ways is practice-led research being used

alongside other research traditions and paradigms, across both the STEM
and HASS sectors, and how are these different research traditions inflecting
one another? Is the practice-led approach developed by the creative sector
being taken up in other disciplines and domains, and in what ways?

• Flows of people and skills: What do postgraduate researchers do beyond

their practice-led research degree? Do they end up continuing to use
practice-led research if they take up employment within universities (as
teacher or researchers) or is this left behind? Are the skills and approaches
developed by undertaking a formal practice-led research of any benefit to a

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 research candidate’s professional practices after their degree, and are such
skills and capacities of any benefit to non-academic collaborators, colleagues
and the profession as a whole?

• Flows of knowledge and new ideas: What happens to the specific knowledge
contributions, insights and outputs generated through the completion of
hundreds of practice-led research degrees around Australia each year? Are
there any flow ons, spin offs and applications for other practitioners,
professions and communities – or do practice-led research outputs remain
locked up in the vaults of library and digital theses archives?

Clearly, such questions could also be asked of innovative activities and practitioners
within professional and underground contexts of arts, design, media and all their
hybrids.

To achieve all this, we cannot just think about and track the wider innovation system,
we need to build some innovation systems for practice-led researchers at the
postdoctoral, senior academic and expert practitioner level. We need to find ways for
practice-led research in arts, design and media to be measured and harnessed
alongside other research traditions and paradigms, across both the STEM and HASS
sectors and within both university and industry settings. A number of components in
the innovation system need to be targeted, giving practice-led researchers access to:

1. postdoctoral opportunities and distinctive competitive research grants and

fellowships available for practice-led researchers and studio-based
academics;

2. dedicated and fully-funded research centres and institutions based around

practice-led research, both within and beyond universities;

3. university faculties, which specialize in practice-led research, functioning as

hubs that support innovative people and practices and their connection into
professions, commerce and communities;

4. a HASS-specific, national research funding body, like the AHRC in the UK,
that will get creative production its proper, rather than marginal, place;

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 5. cultural policies that support R&D in a systemic comprehensive way, at least
matching if not bettering the resources and energies poured into arts and
cultural heritage and archives;

6. shared vocabularies that connect across the different research traditions and
approaches; and

7. workable definitions and measures of creative sector R&D and a pragmatic

theory of creative sector innovation that includes all forms of creation,
application and diffusion across and between the arts, design, media and
communications fields.

We have already raised such points in previous papers (Haseman & Jaaniste 2008;
Jaaniste 2009a, 2009b) and there are signs that others are engaging in a much wider
conversation beyond the postgraduate degree. This was evidenced in the sorts of
debates at the ACUADS conference 2009. It is also part of the specific ambition of at
least one conference late this year. Run by Deakin University, Material Inventions:
Applying Creative Research aims to “explor[e] the collaborative potential of creative
research, in both university-based and extra-university projects” including “the
broader, interdisciplinary and industry applications of creative research” (Deakin
Creative 2009). Paul Carter’s book, Material Thinking: the theory and practice of
creative research (2004) is also important in this regard, because of the depth of
professional (non-university) contexts it covers within its half-a-dozen case studies.
Of course, there would be other sources that share an expansionary vision, but all
these are only beginnings; much more needs to be done.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Many questions and directions for future research and action have been outlined in
this paper, and this should be of no surprise given the expansive series of activities
and components that fall within the innovation cycle and system. Where will the
practice-led research debate and projects take us into the next decade? If practice-
led research remains primarily a postgraduate concern, then discussions around this
form of research will continue to be dominated by compliance issues—attempting the
‘best fit’ between practice-led research and traditional, slow-moving, academic

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research protocols. In this view, research methodology, use of theory, documentation
and archiving, and the articulation of knowledge claims are framed around appeasing
institutional requirements. But the practice-led community needs to sets its sights
higher and wider. The innovation framework and agenda, linking research to
application, diffusion, education and culture, might just be the key. At the very least,
we can use it to unlock our horizons and impact.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is indebted to the research we conducted with the support of the Council
for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences last year on The Arts and Australia’s
National Innovation System 1994-2008. We would also like to thank Keith Armstrong
for feedback on a draft of this paper and for the comments of ACUADS conference
delegates.

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