Institute for Capitalising on Creativity

Nic Beech's area of research is in organisational and personal dynamics, with a focus on the way that identities are socially constructed. He has a particular interest in how these issues are played out in music and also in the organisation that lies behind concerts, festivals and other musical activities including workshops and children's events. Professor Beech has also been involved in managerial activities with the Celtic Connections festival. In 2009, Nic was appointed Lead Fellow by The Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) for its initiative to increase the impact of management research on practice.

School of Management faculty profile

Celia Duffy's research interests revolve around learning and teaching in the performing arts and the use of technology in creative practice. She is currently a co-investigator in an ESRC-funded research project Investigating Musical Performance. She was project director of HOTBED, a three-year JISC-funded project at the RSAMD evaluating the use of networked digital sound materials in Scottish music, and has recently won European funding for the EASAIER project (led by Queen Mary College) which aims to enable better access to and use of digital sound archives. Celia is a long-standing member of the JISC's Moving Picture and Sound Working Group. She chairs the User Panel of the British Library National Sound Archive's Archival Sound Recordings Project. She also serves on the AHRC's ICT Programme Steering Group and Management Group of the Methods Network and recently contributed to its Expert Seminar on creative practice and ICT.

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland faculty profile

Georgina Follett leads Design in Dundee Limited, which works with the ‘V&A at Dundee’, an initiative designed to create a purpose-built gallery space to house collections from the Victoria & Albert Museum and locally curated exhibitions in Dundee. Formerly she was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC funded, 'Past, Present and Future Craft Practice' research project.

Georgina is a contemporary craft practitioner of 40 years, specialising in plique-de-jour enamelling. The premise of her research is that craft is a journey through the mind, an intellectual struggle with the self to continually push personal knowledge boundaries. Craft is a process and life work that strives to bring into form, an aesthetic held between physical vision and intangible consciousness. It is a journey reliant on building tacit knowledge through individual visual obsessions to give voice to that which did not exist. Within critical writings on craft, while the skill of making is clearly communicated, the intellectual and personal voice in the development of work is usually missing. Georgina's research challenges the perceptions and responsibilities of the craftsperson to keep their creative journey silent and author-less. This objective is to expose the evolution of ideas in craft thinking thereby revealing the ideological and philosophical basis that practitioners establish through time.

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee

V&A at Dundee website

Past, Present and Future Craft Practice website

Charlotte Gilmore completed her PhD at University of Edinburgh and her ESRC post doctorate at University of St Andrews School of Management. Her thesis explored the life histories of advertising creatives and the nature of advertising creativity. She is now involved in a study exploring music festivals and organisations, to better understand the practices that contribute to creative outcomes. Her other research interests include the career trajectories of advertising creatives and the role of clients in creative production. Prior to pursuing an academic career Charlotte was an Advertising Account Manager.

School of Management faculty profile

Gail Greig's research interests concern collective knowing and learning in work and organisation. She takes a practice-based approach, presently cultural historical activity theory, to examine emergent contradictions between key contextual features of collective learning and knowing, and their implications for notions of best practice, and knowledge transfer, translation, exchange or mobilisation. She is currently a member of a research group studying organising practices in music festivals.

School of Management faculty profile

Research focus: The nature, operation and maintenance of an institutional field, with reference to book publishing. Elizabeth's research traces the relationships between writers, agents, publishers, editors, commissioning agents, critics, booksellers, readers, and their inter-relationships in the market, through prizes, book fairs and trade fairs.

Tom Inns is Director of the AHRC/EPSRC Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative, a five-year programme supporting 40 research projects across the UK. His personal research is exploring emergent roles for design, particularly the contribution it can make in facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. This involves designing workshops for different stakeholder groups and experimenting with a portfolio of techniques for sharing knowledge, auditing capability, visualising possibilities, evaluating opportunities and mapping routes to implementation. In his research Professor Inns has collaborated extensively with business. Recent work involves leading a two year KTP programme enhancing the knowledge management capability of Glasgow based design consultancy, Graven Images.

University of Dundee faculty profile

Dr Martin Kornberger's research is in the nature of design, space and the performance of creativity in organisations. He is currently involved in an ethnographic research project with one of Australia's leading architecture firms where he studies the relation between creativity and the organization of work. In conjunction with another large international architecture firm based in Sydney, he is conducting research looking at the impact of space on research culture at universities. Dr Kornberger is also doing theoretical research into an understanding of branding as a concept that combines creativity and several important fields of organization studies including identity, culture, power and strategy. Dr Kornberger is a founding member of the Center for Creative Cities at the University of Technology, Sydney.

School of Management faculty profile

Nicola Searle (PhD Economics) currently supervises ICC's Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Creative Scotland, and is Senior Knowledge Exchange Associate for Moving Targets, a Scottish Funding Council project based at Abertay University which aims to develop new models for new media audiences in the creative media industries.

Nicola is an economist specialising in Creative Industries and Intellectual Property. She is interested in understanding how the digital era influences business models and the role of co-creation and user-generated-content. Her applied economic analysis employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods including econometric and statistical techniques. In Moving Targets, Nicola works with SMEs to better understand their business models and analyse data stemming from consumption and production of digital media.

Dimitrinka's current research focuses on employment in the creative industries. In particular, she is interested in skills development and learning in freelance environments. Themes in her research involve labour markets, freelance careers, fragmentation of employment, communities of practice, social capital, networks and small independent production companies. Dimitrinka is also interested in the ways in which the changing institutional environment interacts with the established norms of the professional community and the implications this has for individuals, organisations and policymakers. Her doctoral research investigated the above in the context of the UK television sector.

Barbara Townley 's research interests include how the language of management might be translated into a medium that is more accessible to those working in creative activities; the negotiation of conflicting 'value spheres' between commercial pressures and creative endeavour; and the construction and operation of institutional fields.  Previous research grants include an AHRC/ESRC/DTI and Arts Council grant to hold a series of workshops on 'The discipline of creativity: exploring the paradox', examining the management and organization characteristics of the creative industries.

Download Barbara Townley CV (PDF, 178 KB)

School of Management profile

Louise Valentine is a Design Lecturer & Postdoctoral Research Investigator at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, fellow funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her research considers craft to be a system of thought, where there is no separation between the subconscious and conscious levels of being because this separation offers little value when contemplating through making. The ability to sustain participation in the reflective dialogue is an integral component of craft, and that craft is an act of thinking and making rather than an object.
The questions driving the research include, what is craft dialogue? How does a craftsperson communicate the knowledge embodied and embedded in craft? What is the significance of the craftsperson's approach to thinking for other knowledge domains?

University of Dundee staff profile

Gregor White's practice and theory-based research interests include the social and performative functions of interactive spaces. Recent projects include presentation and performance of 'Lifelines' interactive drama at San Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium, production of 'Gigajig' a motion capture based dance performance with Dundee Rep Theatre and 'Journey through the Centre of the Earth' animation and installation at Our Dynamic Earth visitor centre. Currently working on an innovative web development project in collaboration with BSkyB and researching new forms of creative practice in the production and consumption of web-based user generated content.

University of Abertay staff profile page