Creative economy businesses and arts researchers speak different languages, and REACT will force a translation. The problem is straightforward: small creative companies need academic expertise to develop new products and audience experiences, but the two worlds operate on incompatible timetables, values, and vocabularies. REACT’s solution is a structured programme called Sandbox, adapted from Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre, which assembles mixed teams of researchers, micro-businesses, and technology partners around themed cohorts. These teams follow a shared development and testing schedule, building working prototypes and sharing lessons across the group. The hub spans six universities across England and Wales, covering fields from archaeology to computer science, and works in two languages. If it succeeds, the model could permanently change how universities and creative industries collaborate—not through one-off projects, but through a repeatable mechanism that aggregates ideas, talent, and resources. The immediate impact would be new digital platforms and audience engagement tools; the longer-term shift would be a cultural change inside universities, embedding creative economy partnerships into institutional practice rather than treating them as occasional add-ons.
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REACT: Research & Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies. Knowledge Exchange gets lost in translation. Creative Economy demand and Arts and Humanities research culture too routinely fail to understand each other. They can seem to work to different rhythms and values. But they do and they must match, and they must talk, urgently. We will make that happen. REACT will engineer the radical change needed through its unique partnership with a leading Creative Economy broker, Watershed, pioneering a new model of dynamic creative interaction: Sandbox. REACT will match Creative Economy demand with Arts and Humanities excellence, creating sustainable partnerships that will provide significant economic and societal impacts, generating a transformative shift in capacity and HEI cultures at all levels. We will bring two cultures together and lead the necessary process of organisational change. Within four years we will have demonstrated the value of sustained tight integration of the CE sector and AH communities, and secured national and international recognition for our agile mechanism for dynamic knowledge exchange. The REACT Hub is a collaboration between the University of the West of England, Watershed Arts Trust, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. It reaches across two dynamic UK regions, and uniquely across three cultural areas and two languages and creative economies. It brings together Arts & Humanities research from fields as diverse as Archaeology, Architecture, Classics, History, English, Welsh, Translation Studies, Performance, Media and Cultural Studies, Design, Music, Computer Science and Digital Technologies. REACT will offer researchers the chance to work with Micro businesses and SMEs, technology partners from either the commercial sector or the partner HEIs and larger scale Cultural Economy and Cultural Industry partners who have an interest in new creative content, and assets to exploit in partnership with academics. REACT will bring together high quality academic research with creative technology partners to developing innovative ways of engaging audiences. Creative economy partners will have the opportunity to develop new delivery platforms and researchers will be able to engage with audiences in new ways. REACT Universities have teamed up Bristol's Watershed Media Centre to adapt their ground breaking innovation development programme, Sandbox, for working with academic researchers. This programme is supported by the University of Exeter's Innovation Fitness Test offering participating Creative Economy partners the chance to strengthen their market potential. Watershed's Sandbox brings together production teams around themed cohorts to make practice based prototypes; production teams follow a common timetable of development and testing, sharing their learning with one another across the cohort. This proven method aggregates ideas, talent and resources harnessing powerful outputs from diverse cross disciplinary inputs. See http://www.theatresandbox.co.uk/2010-evaluation/ for an evaluation of the 20101 Theatre Sandbox scheme.
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