Work together. Explore Together. Grow Together.
I'm interested in working with a small number of independent studios to investigate challenges, develop new propositions, and create opportunities for work that doesn't yet exist.
Not as a sales agent. Not as another layer between you and your clients. As a creative and strategic collaborator who brings a different perspective, complementary experience and a willingness to take responsibility for developing ideas.
Collaborative R&D for creative and technology studios.
The problem with waiting for the brief
Creative studios are often very good at responding to tenders and making things happen once a project is commissioned. But developing the next opportunity is harder.
You're busy delivering existing work. New ideas compete with client deadlines. Senior people are already stretched. You can see opportunities to do something different, but you can't justify recruiting a team to explore possibilities that aren't yet funded.
And the commissioning process doesn't always help. Projects are sometimes defined too early, with the solution chosen before the problem has been investigated. At other times, organisations know they want to innovate but struggle to commit to anything.
I think there's useful territory between those two extremes. Applied R&D can make an idea tangible before anyone commits to the full project.
What I bring.
My experience combines audience and behavioural research, creative development, strategy, technology, partnerships and production.
I can help investigate the problem behind a client's ambition, identify opportunities, develop new propositions and create a route into paid early-stage work.
I also bring experience of working on both sides of the relationship: developing and producing work inside creative businesses, and advising the organisations and programmes that commission and fund it.
That means I understand the pressures involved in making ambitious projects commercially and practically credible.
What we could do together.
Identify shared opportunities: Look at audience, customer or organisational challenges that connect to your capabilities and interests.
Develop joint R&D propositions: Turn an early observation or question into a focused investigation, with a clear purpose, practical research and experiments worth funding.
Make and test ideas: Combine my research, strategy and creative development with your design, engineering, production or specialist technical capabilities.
Develop larger projects: Use the evidence, prototypes and relationships from early R&D to develop more substantial commissions, products or services.
How a collaboration works.
We remain independent businesses, bringing different strengths to a shared challenge.
We might begin by exploring a few areas of mutual interest and identifying one worth pursuing. From there, the aim is to shape a defined, paid piece of R&D that benefits the commissioner and makes good use of both partners' capabilities.
The scope, leadership, responsibilities, fees and ownership of each project are agreed around the work itself.
There's no expectation of exclusivity, automatic retainers or substantial unpaid development.
I'm not looking to sell a studio's existing services for commission, and I'm not trying to build another agency. I want to develop work together.
The collaborators I'm looking for.
I'm particularly interested in established smaller studios with strong creative or technical capabilities in interactive experiences, immersive environments, digital products, physical computing, storytelling, participation and experiential design.
Studios with an appetite to explore new applications for what they're good at, rather than simply do more of the same.
The strongest collaborations will have complementary capabilities, a shared curiosity and enough trust to challenge each other's thinking.
Interested in exploring a partnership?
I'd like to develop a small network of complementary R&D partners rather than an open-ended list of suppliers.
What might come of it? A funding bid. A paid experiment. A prototype. A new product proposition. A research partnership. A better-developed client opportunity. A longer-term project.
If you run a studio and see an overlap, tell me what you're interested in developing, where your capabilities are strongest and what you'd like to explore beyond your existing work.
We can find out whether there's a challenge worth investigating together.