Diffusion eBooks for Market Day and MyCake

There are now a set of new eBooks to accompany Market Day available on the Diffusion website. Help yourself tigger!

Whilst we're at it I've also published 3 ideas on how to improve your financial management (unsurprisingly linked to MyCake functions). Again, help yourself.

ps - feel free to pass them on.

Arts funding & the Diamond market ... an analogy to shed light on the current position

The current state of arts funding is rather like the diamond market before de Beers lost their monopoly on supply. If Arts Council England is the equivalent of de Beers then HE institutions are the diamond mine owners. There are key lessons and key differences of course.

Key Lessons:
- we cannot continue to control supply in a rapidly growing market [especially when the supply grows yet faster than the market]
- primary producers benefit from a highly fluid yet immobile workforce as this maintains stability whilst minimising the labour costs.
- there is a huge power imbalance between the HE institutions and the labour force. In the creative and cultural sector this means that HE institutions obtain benefit from cheap, regularly renewed, highly competitive labour markets. The associate lecturers receive very little benefit from the current structure of these labour markets ... this keeps this labour force below the poverty line in many cases
- this position is compounded by the cap on daily rates imposed in the grant system by ACE because they have been historically unwilling to engage with the economic and policy challenges that come with the reviewing their position
- the workforce are immobile because they don't have sufficient transferable skills or resources to move into sectors which deliver higher incomes

Key differences:
- the diamond market seeks to push up prices rather than reduce cost as the mechanism of increasing/maintaining profitability i.e. it works with demand economics not supply economics
- the diamond mine workers are less mobile than those in the creative industries. a
As the creative workforce realises that there are options beyond teaching and grant funding they will diversify their income portfolio. to do this they require either a) entrepreneurship skills and/or b) to acquire skills needed to get a job in a creative sector or any other. The process of development of skills to increase employability does not operate very well in the creative industries
- the elasticity of demand is well mapped out in the diamond market but is not in the Creative Industries ... I suggest that the elasticity is greater than the subsidy system thinks it is.

Arboreal vs. Rhizomic

The seekers (the accretive innovations of experience) and the finders (conceptualists & the success of youth) that David Galenson speaks of as the different types of innovators want different things fortunately. Finders such as Martin Creed get the benefit of the winning but also the hiatus and the self-questioning don’t support the activity of the finder as they encourage people to do more of the same. Seekers such as Gillian Carnegie and Cornelia Parker have the benefit of the nomination but not the winning as it supports the way they work.
This hierarchical view of winners, rankings and scale gets stuck in that it works against the flexibility, responsiveness and freedom to follow your nose which is important in the support of intuition in innovation. In this sense the rhizomic approach with the agglomeration effect has a significant role to play.
So lets stop this chest beating boys and get down out of the trees. When you start walking on two legs and wear a skirt you’ll find that a pair of heels gives you something more important than blisters.
It is this rhizomic collaborative approach which will be important in the internationalisation of the SME’s in the creative & knowledge industries worldwide in the 21st century not the scale driven arboreal approach of the 19th century manufacturing economies.

So we do need to balance the prizes and the youth awards with policies that support the accretive and experience based breakthroughs but we need to support them in ways other than hierarchical rankings and prize structures ... we need to support them through clusters, collaboration and synergistic connections to breadth of ideas.