The biggest barrier to digital innovation in the arts isn’t budget or expertise — it’s trust, old procurement habits, and a misplaced belief that high cost equals high value. The opportunity is for leadership.
Are you looking at your digital output and wondering whether it’s working hard enough? Are you passing around a document hoping a budget line will magically appear? Are the board saying “TikTok” and you’re wanting to ask, “Why? No really — why?”
A recent article in Arts Professional about how the current funding squeeze is “driving digital innovation” got me scratching my head. It reminded me of a problem hiding in plain sight in many arts organisations: the assumptions senior management hold about digital projects — their cost, their scale, and their expectations.
In a cash-strapped world where an organisation’s digital presence is its marketing and its public face, what might actually help cut through the noise and inform pragmatic decision-making?
If you’re a decision-maker whose comfort zone is avoiding visible risk, some of what follows may make those decisions easier.
And if you’re savvy enough to know this already, read on and bask in the warm glow of self-recognition.
Arts Professional argues that severe funding cuts are forcing arts organisations to abandon costly, bespoke website rebuilds in favour of shared, subscription-based digital platforms that evolve continuously. It presents this shift as a positive form of “innovation,” claiming that collaborative, cloud-based systems deliver better value, flexibility, and sustainability than traditional project-based models.
The problem arts organisations face isn’t that they’re spending too much on digital. It’s that they’re not spending what they have as effectively as they could, trapped by an old procurement mindset that assumes the more money you spend, the better the result will be. Put simply, the problem digital really faces inside many organisations isn’t strategy — it’s literacy.
Those who understand how digital works — what’s possible, what’s worth testing, what needs to evolve — often don’t have the agency to make it happen. The decision-makers do, but they rarely understand the value.
Many senior leaders never had the chance to cut their teeth on digital’s creative possibilities. So they don’t recognise its real cost, or its real potential. Their instinct is to see anything “digital” as expensive by definition — because that’s how the old procurement model worked.
If it doesn’t come with scale, deep expertise, and a hefty price tag, it can’t possibly be credible. And since we can’t afford that, well… best to carry on as we are. There, there.
Digital’s challenge then isn’t knowledge, expertise, or budget squeezes so much as trust. People don’t trust what they don’t understand, so their amygdala fires and they interpret any proposed development, experiment, iteration, or innovation as a threat — and shut it down. It takes a bold, brave, and well-adjusted leader to listen to the expertise around them and pursue the counter-intuitive path.
The past twenty years have seen innovation after innovation disrupting the creative industries.
Eighteen years ago it was the Kodak Zi8 handheld video camera, which could record video to an SD card, empowering the “citizen journalists” to capture the story themselves and submit their footage to user-generated-content hubs.
Affordable edit software soon followed, empowering those on a consumer budget to create their own content — to innovate, to create a point of difference. Then came the iPhone with enhanced video capability, and everyone had the ability to be a video creator. All this long before YouTube invested in its platform as a content destination. That wouldn’t happen for another ten years.
The same has happened over the past five years with Canva superseding Adobe’s image-editing suite. Canva saw an opportunity to simplify the image and video creation process by making things a lot more intuitive and a bit less earnest. They disrupted established norms by keeping an eye on what the audience needed (even if the audience didn’t realise it).
Why would you seek out the work of a graphic designer charging £400 a day or an agency charging double that, when you can create something that is good enough in-house and costs less per month than the catering supplies in the kitchen?
Sticking with the more expensive option has a certain comfort: it protects the decision-maker against confronting how radically the landscape has changed and just how much they themselves don’t understand. That’s a scary thing to have to look at — even more so to risk revealing to those you’re leading. Best spend more money. Or not, as it turns out.
What outlook might work instead?
If you’re in the fortunate position of recruiting new talent, pay closer attention to evidence of their own innovation — self-starting, resourceful types who show a genuine interest not only in artistic output but in the technological space your hybrid team inhabits. Look for people with entrepreneurial spirit as well as clear proof of their technical skills.
If you’re working with existing teams, it’s trickier. Look for clarity. Listen for strategic vision that leads with curiosity and values iteration. Challenge your assumptions about areas outside your wheelhouse. Lean into the moments where you don’t control the outcome; trust others to take the lead. Give them the space to experiment. Encourage counter-intuitive solutions that don’t demand huge outlay. Maybe it’s just approving a £1,000 credit-card spend and letting them prove what’s possible. Give them the agency to find the tools they need to realise the creative vision behind the brand you’re responsible for. You may be surprised by what they achieve.
The old procurement mindset treats digital as luxury infrastructure that demands an equally luxurious budget. That mindset stifles creative thinking because it limits choice. By allowing it to persist, you’re actively choosing to suppress creativity.
Make a different choice. A modest outlay on curiosity — a plugin, a workflow, a short trial — can unlock more value than a £30,000 rebuild, redesign, or refresh. Real innovation lies in marginal gains which also, conveniently, happen to be much cheaper.
The challenge here is one of leadership — not just from the top seat but from everyone around the table. The shift in mindset is immense, difficult, and necessary. But the prize is equally large: originality, distinctiveness, clarity, and energy.
Distinctiveness may occupy a smaller line on the budget sheet, but its value is far greater. Trust drives creativity.
