An Organizational Perspective on ArtScience Collaboration: Opportunities and Challenges of Platforms to Collaborate with Artists

Abstract

Artists are often seen as innovators and producers of creative and extraordinary new ideas. Additionally, experiencing art and artistic processes is an important opportunity for learning and exploration. Thus, corporations and scientific organizations have experimented with initiatives that generate artscience collaboration, such as fellowships, long-term collaborations with artists, and artist-in-residence programs. Looking at outcomes in the long-term, it is possible to identify important contributions to scientific, technological, and artistic fields that stem from artscience collaboration opportunities in organizations. On the other hand, it is often difficult to define immediate tangible outcomes of such processes as innovation as interdisciplinary interaction and learning processes are valuable experiences that do not always manifest directly in outcomes that can be measured. Drawing from cases of artscience programs and qualitative interviews with program managers, scientists, and artists, this article explores how artscience collaboration in an organization adds value and helps overcome organizational challenges regardless of such outcomes. By shifting the focus from the outcome to the process of artscience collaboration, it is possible to discover in more depth value-added contributions of artscience experiences on an individual level (e.g., new ways of knowing and thinking, understanding of materials and processes, and learning). Moreover, such contributions tell stories of connecting the process of artscience programs to the organizations’ goals of developing a new generation of leaders and driving a more adaptive, innovative culture. These benefits of artscience opportunities need to be supported by managerial activities in the organization. Thus, it enables a more differentiated understanding of possible contributions of artscience collaboration to organizations and helps to define the best model to create such opportunities. The article also recommends future research directions to further advance artscience collaboaration, especially in light of pertinent movements such as STEAM and Open Innovation, and promising developments in related fields such as neuro-aesthetics.

Exploring Competing Perspectives on How to Design Open Innovation Program for High School STEM Education: A Case Study

“…We used Q methodology to explore multiple stakeholders ' Research literature and expert opinions on OI underscore that OI needs to link the community and civic spirit [28]. These views also argue that OI can cultivate imagination and creativity by connecting with culture and art [29]. The recent platform ecosystem requires the connection and imagination inherent in OI [13].…”

The Artist as Innovation Muse: Findings from a Residence Program in the Fuzzy Front End

“…The findings on what exactly the researchers were inspired by and what their resulting motivation is directed towards point to a specific artist-related benefit of this interdisciplinary dialogue on the one hand. On the other hand, they illuminate limited implementation potentials relativizing the benevolent view on art-science collaborations in previous research (Schnugg 2019;Schnugg and Song 2020).…”

“…Schnugg's explorative study on art-science collaborations (Schnugg 2019) comprises 18 cases based on 58 interviews altogether, among them 15 with program managers and 18 with scientists. Her findings suggest that art-science collaborations improve organizations' ability to explore and discern innovation opportunities, although effects at corporate level are subtle and difficult to trace (Schnugg and Song 2020). Art-science collaborations provide "liminal spaces for experimentation" (Schnugg and Song 2020, p. 7) and contribute to an environment that enables employees to develop an innovative mindset to the full.…”

Friction gains in art & science collaboration: more than noise

“…For example, communication theories offer a lot of insights into why engaging art and science collaboration, and overcoming issues in communication, can be impactful (Schnugg, 2019). Taking insights further, it is possible to employ strategies that are also used in organization studies and to use these insights to make strong arguments for why organizations or funders might engage in this process (Schnugg & Song, 2020). A broader body of work is emerging that elaborates on this approach, adding more theoretical insights.…”