Announcing Culture Shift

We are proud to announce Culture Shift, an experiment with the British Council’s Creative and Cultural Economy programme and Social Innovation Camp. It will pilot in four markets, with the intention of creating new digital tools for the creative economy, new cross-sector conversations, and to bringing innovative ideas back to the UK from four exciting cities.

Between now and mid-April, we’ll be traveling to visit the ccHub in Lagos, Nigeria, The Hub in Johannesburg, South Africa, the iHub in Nairobi, Kenya, and the TEDx Egypt in Cairo, Egypt getting creative pioneers – including artists, designers, festival organisers, museum managers, and other creative workers –  together with designers, businesspeople, and developers, and digging into the needs of the Creative economies in those countries. The events will culminate with a pitching session where the teams will pitch the projects they’ve developed in 48 hours to a panel of UK and local investors, and they’ll receive some support from the local partners in the process.

We reckon we’ll learn a thing or two that we can bring back to the UK in the process.

Not only that, but we’re bringing along a brilliant selection of people to each event – both UK investors and some experts in digital and creative sectors. These include Kelly Clark from Marmanie, Tim Kindberg of Matter2Media, Ryan Bowman of Circle Digital, Siân Prime, of Goldsmiths University & East African Entrepreneurship Diploma Stephen Rockman from Merism Capital, and James Baster from Here’s a Hand.

We’ll be blogging and taking photos to let you out there know what’s going on. Stay in touch with the project on http://bccultureshift.wordpress.com, and we’re looking forward to seeing the outputs!