Innovation in the UK

Scoping exercise

We identified the fund's themes using a combination of a structured interview programme and a crowdsourcing project with Google Moderator

The fund was scoped using two distinct methods to reflect the breadth of the sector, in terms of organisational structure, size, region, art form and, importantly, expertise in digital.

The two methods were:

Crowdsourcing the thematic priorities using Google Moderator

We used Google Moderator - an easy to use application that gathers and prioritises opinions[1] - to inform the choice of the Digital R&D Fund's thematic areas.

The results from this exercise were considered alongside the semi-structured interviews and feedback received by the programme team from experts during meetings held in April and May 2011, giving the programme's six thematic areas.

The most popular thematic areas

Ideas for the fund's themes were collected and votes registered between 16 May and 28 May 2011. A total of 303 people submitted 142 ideas and cast 5,022 votes.

We aggregated these various ideas into ten separate thematic areas and ranked them by their popularity.[2] These were (in order of popularity):

  • User-Generated Content and Social Media
  • Mobile and location
  • Distribution
  • Data
  • Archives
  • Education and learning
  • Fundraising
  • Games
  • Resource efficiency
  • Physical space

A number of submitted ideas were in the area of digital art and creative practice. As the fund is open to applications for projects involving digital art form development and creative practice, insofar as they meet the fund's audience and/or business model objectives, creative practice has not been identified as a separate thematic area.

A number of other ideas proposed concerned how arts and cultural organisations can use technology to reach hard-to-reach communities (including socially excluded groups or groups living in geographically isolated communities). As they are key audience groups, projects aimed at engaging such audiences are already seen as within the fund's scope, as long as they can be situated under one or more of the thematic areas.

Download the data

The full set of proposed ideas can be viewed in this CSV file.


[1] http://www.google.com/moderator/#0

[2] Specifically, NESTA officials went through each of the 142 ideas submitted and classified them according to ten distinct thematic areas. We then summed the number of times ideas were proposed under each of the thematic areas, for each idea applying a weight of 1 divided by its popularity ranking as determined by Google Moderator's ranking algorithm.