Abstract
The South African Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI), as contemplated in the 2017 South African White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage, plays a vital role in contributing to the creation and diffusion of knowledge, to human and social development, to economic growth and to addressing colonial and apartheid legacies. A national policy research agenda for South Africa’s arts, culture and heritage (ACH) sector, including economic and other types of study, emerged in the 1990s, accompanied by various strategies and action plans. In the past decade, this work has been consolidated and strengthened in the formation and activities of the South African Cultural Observatory (SACO). Yet to be fully explored by SACO is the measurement of innovation across the CCI. The CCI is constituted by multiple and overlapping sub-sectoral domains, public and private actors, and digital, spatial and territorial dimensions, which poses a measurement challenge. How should innovation in the CCI be measured in South Africa, and how can this inform public management and governance of the ACH sector?
The objective of this research was the development of a framework for the measurement of innovation across the CCI. The study adopted the exploratory approach, employing a mixed methods convergent research design for research data creation. This included fusing an unobtrusive research design, a collegiate-consultative purposive survey research design, and, for reflexivity and triangulation purposes, an autoethnographic case study research design. The analytical framework was conceptualised in terms of macro, meso and micro-levels of innovation systems. The unit of analysis at the macro-level was the research-policy nexus of South Africa’s ACH sector. At the meso-level, the unit of analysis was survey respondent data (N=26) and data from survey non-respondents (N=106) that was acquired from non-profit organisations (NPOs), government departments, formal businesses, informal businesses and households that form part of the CCI. The unit of analysis at the micro-level was one household innovation system that introduced one household innovation in one sub-sector of the CCI during the study period.
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This study surfaced evidence of a policy history beset by several public management and governance challenges, including insofar as the use of evidence to inform sector investment programming is concerned. However, it also surfaced the presence of extensive multidisciplinary research that can inform the research-policy nexus of the ACH sector through the White Paper’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework. Yet largely missing from this evidence base is an innovation measurement framework aligned to the White Paper’s goal, to its M&E framework, and to actors within the CCI sub-system. Addressing this policy gap, the main contention of this study is that the systems approach to measurement of innovation should be applied in the South African CCI.
Addressing the scholarly context of innovation policy and innovation measurement, a decolonial transformative innovation policy perspective is conceptualised as a lens through which innovation measurement can be oriented towards redressing colonial legacies and addressing present social and environment urgencies. This perspective necessitates the adaptation of research practices to account for contextual factors, as these are expressed within the different institutional sectors targeted by innovation surveys. By informally testing and then piloting different adaptations of these questionnaires, this study created evidence about innovation and innovation activities, as well as important methodological data about survey response and non-response. Piloting a new question on directionality, particularly social benefits of innovation, the study found that while there are different incentive structures at work within different types of organisations, each has the potential to use innovation to deliver social and environmental benefits. Triangulating these findings, this study elicited autoethnographic evidence to illustrate the systemic nature of innovation and its directionality.
The significance of this study can be understood as threefold: First, it refocuses the emphasis of innovation measurement in the South African CCI beyond the formal business sector, to include the public sector, NPOs, informal businesses and households. Innovation is a broad phenomenon, which can and should be measured in a comprehensive manner. Second, in the programmatic, public value-oriented construction of measurement of innovation in the South African CCI, it centres directionality of innovation as a critical policy rationale to
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ensure that innovation contributes to achieving the stated policy vision and goals. Third, this study is significant to the extent that it considers the policy implications of a continuum of knowledge formality and knowledge informality as an important feature of innovation in the South African CCI.
Located within an interdisciplinary conjuncture comprising Public Administration (including Public Management and Governance), Innovation Studies, Decolonial Thinking, and the Cultural and Creative Industries (Creative Economy), this research presents several contributions. The three main contributions are, first, a theoretical contribution: the exploration and articulation of a decolonial transformative innovation policy perspective; second, an empirical contribution: piloting of the application of the newly revised general definition of innovation in the 2018 Oslo Manual within multiple institutional sectors per the System of National Accounts (SNA) 2008 in the same economic sector (the CCI); and third, a methodological contribution: this is the use of autoethnographic data to adapt measurement practice to country and sector specificities, including local histories and epistemologies.