1. NESTA Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture,
Scotland
Gillian Easson, NESTA
www.nesta.org.uk/digital_rnd_scotland

2. About NESTA…
Founded: 1998, with £300M endowment
Mission: Bring ideas to life and help make innovation happen
How? Through policy research, programmes and investment
NESTA’s 3 main areas of work:
 Innovation and Economic
Growth
 Social and Public Sector
Innovation
 Creative Economy

3. NESTA Digital R&D Arts and Culture, Scotland
The Fund is a partnership between Creative Scotland, Arts & Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) and NESTA to support arts and cultural
organisations across Scotland who want to work with digital technologies to
expand their audience reach and engagement and/or explore new business
models.
The Fund’s overall objective is:
“to enable the use of digital technologies in the arts and cultural
sector to engage audiences in new ways and to create opportunities
for new business models”

4. Supporting cultural/arts organisations to innovate
Enabling arts and cultural organisations to engage audiences in new ways
and create opportunities for new business models, through the use of digital
technology.
Arts Technology Research
organisation partner team
Digital R&D Fund
Digital innovation projects and sector-wide knowledge

5. Why NESTA?
 Public benefit
 Research outcomes
 Transferability/scaleability
 Benefit to the wider sector not just the individual cultural
organisations

6. NESTA creative economy programmes
 Support for arts and cultural organisations to innovate
 Creative entrepreneur programmes/resources
 Mentoring for creative business start-up and growth
 Skills for creative industries
 Policy and research

7. Audience engagement and reach:
Broadening - capturing a larger share of the population known to
be traditional participants but who currently do not
participate
Deepening - intensifying current participants level of
involvement by eg increasing the number of
attendances or by the degree of audience (active or
passive) engagement
Diversifying - attracting new audience groups/different
demographic (eg young people/rural
population/ international market).

8. Business models
A business model is the mechanism by which a business intends to
manage its costs and generate its outcomes- in the case of for-
profits, the outcomes are primarily revenues earned. In the case
of non-profits, the outcome is primarily the public good created.

9. The Fund’s eligibility criteria
 An arts and cultural organisation based in Scotland - which is
either predominately publically funded and/or is a registered
charity and who wants to work with digital technologies to:
expand its audience reach and engagement and/or explore new
business models
 Your proposal must involve a collaborative partnership between
yourself as an arts and cultural organisation and a technology
provider that can provide technology services to arts and cultural
organisations.

10. What type of projects are we looking for?
 Innovative digital projects which will expand audience reach and
engagement and/or to develop new business models
 Proposals from all sizes of arts and cultural organisations in
Scotland - we have 2 award levels of projects: 1) under £25,000
and 2) £25,000-£100,000
 Collaborations between arts and cultural organisations,
technology providers and where possible, other cultural/arts
organisations.

11. Fund assessment criteria
 Innovation in the proposal
 Wider impact to benefit for the sector (learning / copycat)
 Collaboration is genuine
 Project delivery and timeframe (value for money / realistic)
 Spread of projects
 NESTA / AHRC / Creative Scotland – panel decision

12. Digital R&D Fund timetable
6, 14, 16 March 2012 - Digital Days – Perth, Glasgow, Edinburgh
25 April 2012 - Deadline for Fund applications
14 May 2012 - Organisations informed of funding decisions
1 June 2012 - One day collaborative workshop bringing together all projects
31 March 2013 - All project activity must be completed
Autumn 2012 – Second call for R&D Fund proposals opens (funding decisions
made in January 2013, all project activity must be completed by December 2013)

13. LSO Pulse App

14. Imperial War Museum kiosks

15. The Sage Gateshead plus Manchester Camerata, Aurora, Berwick Maltings,
Alnwick Playhouse and Durham Gala with Videojuicer and Aframe

16. NESTA Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture,
Scotland
www.nesta.org.uk/digital_rnd_scotland
rndscotland@nesta.org.uk
@rndscot