Digital R&D Fund for the Arts

The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts is a new fund to support research and development projects that use digital technology to enhance audience reach and/or explore new business models for organisations with arts projects.

Apply to the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts

The Fund, a partnership between Nesta, the Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is unique in encouraging collaboration between the arts, digital technolgy providers and the research community in order to undertake experiments from which the wider arts sector can learn.

The Fund

£7million will be made available for projects over the period 2012-2014/5 for projects up to a value of £125,000 (with the majority of projects being considerably below this threshold).

The Fund's essential features have been successfully tested during the pilot Digital R&D Fund in 2011/12 and the learning from the pilot will continue, allowing some flexibility to the shape of the main Fund.  Eight projects were successful in receiving funding; learning from those projects can be found on the Arts Council's website.

Visit the Fund website

Learn more about our pilot projects

The Digital Research & Development Fund for Arts and Culture was a pilot project between the Arts Council England, Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Nesta to support arts and cultural organisations across England who want to work with digital technologies to:

• expand their audience reach and engagement and/or
• explore new business models
  

View the eight pilot projects' partners on our interactive map

View Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture in a larger map

Each of the pilot projects were selected because they will produce research and data that other arts and cultural organisations will value highly and, possibly, develop new products/services that can be used by other organisations. A key element of the Fund is the partnerships between arts and cultural organisations, technology providers and researchers.

We invited Dr Paul Gerhardt, of Archives for Creativity, to work with the pilot projects to compile brief case studies of each project, and to capture the main learning points. You can read a summary of his findings here, and the more detailed case studies via the links below.

• Scratchr
• CulturApp: Dickens London Trails
• Social Interpretation
• Pulse
• Culture Cloud
• Punchdrunk: Sleep No More
• Dero
• Happenstance