STEAMhouse
23rd July 2025
The STEAMhouse team were delighted to be invited to join the CreaTech Frontiers delegation at SXSW London, in UK House, to help put the West Midlands creative technology industry on the world stage. Our Business Partnerships Manager, Sophia Tarr, and Marketing Manager Tom Mundy, joined colleagues from the CreaTech Frontiers programme, consisting of Birmingham City University, Coventry University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Warwick and the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was an energetic and inspirational day full of networking and keynotes from the leading lights in the UK’s creative industries. The CreaTech Frontiers and STEAMhouse delegation lit up the day at UK House with a well-received, energetic panel discussion on the role that higher education institutions can play in driving creative technologies, and the challenges that the sector faces, particularly in relation to specific contextual challenges in the West Midlands.
CreaTech Frontiers is a 5-year £7.2 million project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), aiming to drive research and development, business innovation and skills, playing an instrumental role within the creative industries ecosystem across the West Midlands.
You can read a shortened version of the transcript of the panel discussion below.
Cathy Kerfoot:
CreaTech Frontiers is one of AHRC’s most creative clusters. The clusters investment are hugely, hugely important investments for AHRC. They bring together, for those of you that don’t know, Universities, local partners and creative businesses to drive growth, prosperity and opportunity right across the UK. The model was designed to demonstrate and maximise the value of University-led R&D for growth in different places, and it’s been hugely successful. We’ve had new products, new services, new jobs, skills, co-investments and lasting partnerships built right across the country. We’re really delighted that CreaTech Frontiers is joining the clusters family. They’re hugely committed to the places where they work, with huge ambition for their creative sectors. And we are really looking forward to seeing them get started, and I can’t see wait to see what they’re going to achieve over the next five years. We’ve got plans to add more clusters to the family over the coming years and to build a network of them across the UK, hopefully aligned with the coming industrial strategy that I’m sure you’ve heard about already over the last couple of days. Your panel chair, Paul Moor, is Professor of Creative Technologies and Director of Future Screens, Northern Ireland. We have Sarah Ellis, an award-winning producer, currently working as Director of Creative Innovation at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Karen Newman is founder and CEO of BOM Birmingham Open Media, an immersive arts organisation empowering communities through innovation with immersive technology and inclusive learning programmes. And, last but not least, Martin Prendergast of Martin Prendergast Communications, and newly launched Cultural Capital Partners, which helps arts organizations generate income through award-winning brand partnership, and by building relationships with government and other innovative funding models.
Paul Moore:
Welcome everyone to South By Southwest London, and the UK House. I’m Paul Moore, and I have the privilege of chairing this today. CreaTech’s real purpose, I think, is to create cultural brokerage in the area, to act as some kind of mutual agent which can give away money, support projects to help SME drive creative growth from the region, set up training programs, and generally try to build a network. So I’m going to start with you, Karen. Kathy says it’s amazing that it’s coming to the West Midlands. And everybody at CreaTech has been telling us it’s amazing. Is it? Why is it amazing that you’ve now got a creative industries cluster in the West Midlands?
Karen Newman:
I mean, it is amazing and it is a great opportunity, but we’ve got a lot of work to do in the West Midlands as well. We’ve got the most youthful population in the country, but across the region, we’ve got double youth employment than anywhere else in the country. There are also a lot of claimants with mental health issues, disabilities; staggering rates. And I think that that’s not a coincidence that it follows decades of disinvestment in arts and culture. I feel like we need to demonstrate now, over the next few years, what the hell the creative industries can do. And we need to demonstrate the economic, social, health benefits of that industry, like never before. We can be a crucible, but actually we need to be more like dynamite, to really evidence why this stuff was important. So there’s something about the timing, there’s something about the geography, and I think there’s a lot to do with the current challenges and how we do that.
Paul Moore:
It seems to me that the reason I got involved there was because Birmingham is almost, in my opinion, as peripheral to London, as Belfast is. Does it feel that way?
Karen Newman:
Yeah it does, and we’ve got a brilliant region as well. We’ve got Coventry and Warwickshire, who have big investment coming in around there. The geography is complex across the region, and each city has its own unique identity; Wolverhampton feels very different to Walsall. It does feel very different across the Black Country from Birmingham, and that is a challenge. But also, we’ve got a population that’s about the same size as Austin, so it’s easy for it to feel like we can make something that feels extraordinary and that we can create connectivity between people, where things can genuinely happen, collaborations can generally happen, and practice can genuinely develop. I think it’s harder to make that stuff stand out and feel more organic in other places.
Paul Moore:
Sarah, I’m really impressed with the fact that you come from an arts background. And one of the big challenges that we had at Belfast was that as soon as you mentioned creative industries, artists felt they were excluded. How do you make sure those two things remain in tandem? Because they are the same thing.
Sarah Ellis:
They really are. I think you have to be in every room, in every conversation and every possible aspect of that to remind people of that. And I think part of it is placing artists as a part of every conversation, at whatever level, whether it’s the decision making, the political level, whether it’s on the ground. And sometimes we’ve kept the artist as the sort of client or the stakeholder, but they’re the beating heart of the creative industries. They’re the best storytelling tools we have.
Karen Newman:
Creativity is the mother of invention, right? Without creativity, there is no innovation and there is no growth and there’s no progress. But I think we need to bake that in at the earliest level, literally primary school up, a massive reform of education to refine what creativity is and to completely flip the coin and see it for the massive value that it has.
Paul Moore:
I mean, it’s interesting you can talk about art when you talk about artists, and yet CreaTech is being driven by academics. I don’t think my Vice Chancellor’s in the room, but you know, why would universities be involved in this? What do universities do?
Sarah Ellis:
I think that’s the structural shift. When I’ve been part of this collaboration, we’ve seen this collaboration come together, seeing the university partners that have been involved. Creatives come to the region and then we lose them. And we’re seeing what I hope gets served through this collaboration is the convergence of that bounce back. And I think we’ve got people, all of the partners, in their expertise, whether they’re from Coventry, or Warwick or beyond, with a wide range of approaches to how you can engage with projects. I think this is the region’s first very transformative piece of large scale funding that can lead onto something else.
Paul Moore:
And from the AHRC’s point of view, what value do universities bring to this case?
Cathy Kerfoot:
I absolutely agree with what you’ve said. I also think research is important. And I definitely think we do not make enough of the work that they do. They’re already there. They’re already embedded in their community. They’re able to support those things in the community in a stable and longstanding way, that lots of other entities cant. I think it’s magic to bring these things together. Some of it is structural, some of it is the institutions that we have, that we can transform and work with. It’s about thinking really flexibly and fluidly about what research is now, what it can do and who can be involved with it.
Paul Moore:
It’s important, and it’s interesting that the Universities who are getting involved in the clusters aren’t necessarily the usual suspects. Now Martin, I thought I’d get into the really boring stuff about money with you. What kind of innovation funding models should we be using for the arts?
Martin Prendergast:
I don’t know if funding is the boring part, but it’s certainly not what most art and artists spend too much time thinking about, because it’s an issue of time. At the heart of the UK’s world-leading art industry is public funding, and although public funding is squeezed at the moment and is being challenged, it will always be absolutely essential to the making of great art. Public funding allows artists to take creative risks. I’m going to give you a quick example of that now. If you look at the National Theatre, and I don’t know if anybody here has seen War Horse, but War Horse, the show with the life-size puppets, started life in a facility called the National Theatre Studio, which is like a laboratory where they invent new forms of theatre. And it’s only possible because of Arts Council Funding. They spent three years walking around with ladders on their backs and cardboard boxes on their heads, thinking how can they portray horses on the stage? And it was through that process that they developed this show called War Horse, which has galloped all over the world. So in a very real way, public finding is absolutely at the heart of the continued success of the creative industries in the UK. But it is also true that public funding is really being squeezed. The DCMS grants since 2010 are down 18%. Arts capital funding is down by up to 66%, depending on which of the four nations you’re in. And local government funding is down by 50% in 10 years. So these are big numbers, and big cuts to public funding. There was this visionary tax regime from France, and it’s named after Mr. Aillagon, the French culture minister, who in 2003, instituted a tax regime that gave considerable tax rebates to individuals and companies making donations to the arts. It really transformed the arts funding landscape in in France. Since 2003 they’ve basically made it easier for SMEs to make donations to the arts. And that has led to a huge spike in the number of organizations contributing. So I’m campaigning for the UK government to at least consider introducing this in the UK. I don’t know whether it will happen because it’s not free, but it’s a way of bringing new money into the arts.
Paul Moore:
A real possibility is that the programme is highly successful, but doesn’t touch the rest of the ecosystem. How do you think we should go about that?
Karen Newman:
I think the real measure of success is whether people stay, whether artists stay in cities, and whether we can attract talent. And that’s what’s happened with Austin, with people moving out of Silicon Valley, and relocating to Austin. We have to be able to attract talent and we have to be able to keep it in the region. And we have to be able to cater for diversity of thought, diversity of culture, diversity of people across everything that we do. And given the scale of neurodiversity, challenges and disability within our region, we have to work really hard at making sure that that investment goes to really diverse practice and diverse practitioners.
Paul Moore:
How we ensure that that growth isn’t extractive?
Karen Newman:
We’ve got to set up like a collaborative model and another idea of researchers working with artists and technical partners. I think we can’t go into this blind, thinking that you’re going to give an artist some money to make something with creative technology, and that’s it. With immersive tech, it often requires teams of people with different technical skill sets as well as academic input. So we need to be really mindful of that, but also get investment to the ecosystem that is building talent and supporting talent beyond engagement. So organisations that are set up to, and passionate about building a diverse ecosystem, about collaborating and connecting the dots. So not creating something from scratch, but looking at what’s already here and working through those nodes to make sure that it is generally really sustainable. We need to strengthen the fragility of that ecosystem and make sure that the investment is equitable and gets to an equitable place.
STEAMhouse is on a mission to enable innovation through collaboration. Powered by Birmingham City University, it’s a supportive space where entrepreneurs, students, businesses and organisations co-exist to solveproblems and develop new ideas. Comprised of four floors, STEAMhouseprovides the latest technology, kit and equipment, complemented by a portfolio of products services and programmes that include skills development, space hire, consultancy services, and events, it’s a destination that makes innovation happen.
