To date Creativeworks London has supported 98 collaborative research projects, bringing together artists, creative organisations and businesses from across the Creative and Cultural Industries, with researchers from a wide range of disciplines. The CWL Knowledge Exchange team feel very privileged to have worked with such an exciting range of projects, and the breadth of the work undertaken has been quite staggering.
Having cast our net very wide during the first two years of CWL, we took the decision, in this our last year of distribution of funding (although we have a final year of evaluation and dissemination to come) to invite previously supported projects to apply for further support, to really move on their project or business to the next stage. In keeping with the emerging trend across the CCI’s away from grants and towards investment (be it social or for profit) we decided that the decisions would be made on the basis of a 5 minute pitch to a panel. And so BOOST was born! Our rationale for this was to give participants, particularly those from the arts or not for profit sector, an additional “string to their development bow”.
30 projects applied to participate in BOOST and 10 were selected to attend a very intensive workshop and pitch day on 3rd March. Workshops were led by Bethnal Green Ventures on how to develop your “pitch deck”, the Law School at Queen Mary, University of London on IP and on fundraising and development by Cause 4. Projects were given time to develop their pitches taking on board any lessons learnt in the workshop sessions, and the opportunity to “practise pitch” to their peers before giving their presentations to the judging panel.
All projects pitched extremely well, and the judges had a very hard time in selecting three excellent winners who have each received £25,000 to spend on further collaborative research, you can see details of the winning research collaborations here:- http://www.creativeworkslondon.org.uk/cw-news/creativeworks-london-announce-awardees-of-boost-award-2/
As with so many things throughout the Creativeworks London project, BOOST was the first time that we have worked with projects and researchers in this way, and I would like to thank all the participants in the workshop and pitch day for their thoughts and feedback. As a result we will be altering the format of BOOST slightly for the second and final round, and will be running a half day workshop and pitch practise session, followed by a pitch to a judging panel a week later. These 2 half days will be held at the end of June, and confirmed dates and the call for Expressions of Interest will go out shortly after Easter, please do make sure that you are signed up to the CWL mailing list if you are interested in receiving further information.
Suzie Leighton, Head of Knowledge Exchange, Creativeworks London
