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Surprising relations...

from Julie Reynolds, Friday, October 09, 2009

We’ve recently delivered the 5th workshop; Unexpected Angles and Surprising Collaborations for the Knowledge Transfer Exchange Programme, and it seems only two minutes ago when we all started on this journey in April at the London Transport Museum with the first workshop The Role of a Museum in a Business Network. The first workshop discussions on Knowledge Transfer were reported in the "blog" by Fiona Hoppe where '[the workshop] looked in detail at the complex and successful web of stakeholder relationships that the LTM has established and tends to very carefully' and how knowledge transfer 'lay in the fact that the LTM was able to use the intimacy of the relationship and the urgency of a forthcoming event to impose curatorial standards on a stakeholder which pushed them, in turn, to new and more innovative practices about materials they used in advertising' and how 'one of the keys to this success was a strategic shift at the LTM which saw the appointment of a Stakeholder Manager'. The importance of the bridge-builder was reinforced through the workshop on the 22 September where Sally MacDonald, Director, UCL Museums and Collections talked about the UCL's unexpected collaboration with business Arius 3D, and the UCL Museums and Collections Department and the Engineering Department, which was brokered by one of UCL's business advisors {see the website for a full podcast interview with Sally}. ‘What has been good for us as museums, because we are quite small museums and we do not have large numbers of staff, has been to work with particularly UCL business because they have been, if you like, a translator. They have known how to speak to the company in commercial language and they have known how to speak to others as part of UCL and they have really helped us to forge the link’. It seems that the role of a bridge-builder is a conduit for museums, educational institutes and the business sector to work together and that they are pivotal in breaking down language, project management barriers between all the parties involved.

The workshop panel discussion dug deeper into how knowledge transfer unexpected collaborations and surprising angles emerge and how the relationships involved affect the partnerships. Adrian Cooper from the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) also talked about the PCF’s unexpected collaboration with the BBC, YourPaintings. The BBC is working with the PCF to put all of the 200,000 paintings it has captured in its catalogues on to a website that will interact with the BBC archive. Adrian emphasised how both parties being open and flexible is essential for a surprising project to develop successfully and how the PCF have learnt about exit strategies through the contract process with the BBC which is another key factor for collaborative projects. If collaborators need to separate, a clear and effective plan needs to be in place to ensure that the separation causes as little disruption as possible. Lucy Byatt, Head of National Programmes, Contemporary Art Society (CAS) talked about the New CAS Annual Award for Museums which focuses on bringing artists close to museum curators. This was developed over three years with a modern day philanthropist. Lucy felt it was important for museums to be clear about what they want from collaborative partnerships and to be open to serendipity for a project to develop successfully. Sally MacDonald says *‘I don’t see that there is a great deal of difference between a commercial partnership and any other kind of partnership, in that you need to be clear at the outset about what you want to get out of it and what you are going to put into it and what you are going to do if things do start to go wrong. It is about absolute clarity of roles upfront and a respect for somebody else’s point of view'*. These interviews illustrate again that the 'human relationship' , 'respect', 'clarity', and 'openness', are key factors for each party to learn from another and go on to develop a sustainable and solid knowledge transfer projects - this observation reminds me of my colleague, Paul Corney's personal note on his Skype profile 'Listen or thy tongue will make thee deaf'*.

The UCL collaboration is a unique one involving lots of partners, bringing together museums, collections, two departments in an educational institute and two businesses. This takes me back to the "blog" which talks about the difficulty of interdisciplinary knowledge transfer projects in educational institutions. The UCL partnership with Arius 3D has enabled Slade students to learn about the use of 3D scanning for use in creative projects and has given staff the opportunity to build working relationships with each other through a strong project as well as learning about business and its development. Sally commented ’They {Arius 3D} made the initial contact with the Engineering Department and with UCL business and I think the reason why we got involved as UCL museums is to do with personal relationships. For a start the contact that we had with Engineering and UCL business already meant that there were very helpful people within those departments who thought of us and brought us in and also those people were personally committed to using the collections in interesting ways’. Sally then talked about how the initial collaboration with Arius 3D developed into a new project, the development of a new business to expand the original project, where UCL have {uniquely} been involved from the beginning: ‘It is very different to any of the collaborations we have had before, partly because we were in it from the beginning. It was not an add on or a business that was already up and running; ....and it has since developed in all sorts of interesting ways and another company has been set up, called IET, which is looking at, together with us, developing 3D image libraries and touring exhibitions and we have been very much part of that from the start and on the steering group and so on. So from my point of view that has provided a real insight into how business start-ups happen, but also having the opportunity to shape a collaboration has been really, really exciting’. Surprising collaborations create interesting knowledge transfer projects for all the parties involved, each party has to be receptive, open and clear on its objectives and commitment to enable the project to grow often in unexpected ways. UCL has an effective process of communication through its bridge-builder to enable this to happen. In turn though, a bridge-builder is an additional form of support which unfortunately small and local authority museums do not have access to and is a concern which Sally recognised, having worked in local authorities for 17 years. Sally would like to see ‘a few really big high profile partnerships happening and the results of those shared more widely..then libraries and small museums would have access to the kinds of advice and brokerage they need to host small scale events for businesses and develop long term relationships with businesses’. Indeed, the aim of this exchange programme is for each business and museum, library and archive to share and learn their experiences, offering effective KT for each participant to take back to their workplace and pass on.

We are now coming full circle to the bridge-builder being key to innovative KT projects and how the unexpected and surprising angles emerge from openness and flexibility and in the final celebration workshop on 20th October at the Wellcome Collection we will be asking the following questions: What makes a person a bridge builder and how can we become one in an organisation?

Please let us know your thoughts on these questions and see the discussion board on; What are your experiences of KT that you could share to assist other museums, libraries and archives in best practice?