CHI’s Roles in Innovation Ecosystems

Purpose: invite participants to reflect on and expand their understand of the value proposition that heritage organisations and practitioners can bring to innovation processes.

CHIs play a number of different roles in innovation ecosystems. ekip research has introduced a rubric of six innovation roles that CHIs can play:

1. Institutional hackers: Institutions that bend or stretch existing rules to prototype new models, navigate rigid systems, or challenge power dynamics.
2. Cultural anchors: Institutions that provide symbolic and identity-based grounding for communities. 
3. (social) connectors: Institutions that act as platforms for participation, dialogue, and mutual learning.
4. Economic integrators: Institutions that link heritage to markets and economic flows, managing sustainability and impact through entrepreneurial or hybrid models.
5. Experimental spaces: Institutions that create room to test new ideas, methods, or partnerships in protected, flexible, or informal ways.
6. Field builders: Institutions that strengthen the broader ecosystem by shaping narratives, building capacity, and cultivating shared standards and knowledge.

In small groups, participants discussed the key characteristics of each role, then focused on one or two roles as the core basis for imagining their speculative, fictional CHI.

Typology of roles for Cultural Heritage Institutions in Innovation Ecosystems

• Practical tool

Imagining a SPECULATIVE Fictional CHI

Purpose: participants will learn and practice how to imagine and design possible future scenarios using a technique called speculative scenario design. This activity encourages creative collaboration and helps participants strengthen their innovation-thinking skills.

Using the prompts provided in the worksheet, teams of 4-5 participants will imagine a speculative, fictional CHI that fulfills the core innovation role they have selected (for example, a team might choose to explore the role of the institutional hacker). The exercise invites participants to think beyond current norms and paradigms— considering new and different ways CHIs might be organised, the types of heritage and communities they might engage with, and the innovation barriers and enablers they could encounter within the next five years.

During Creative Skills Week, participants randomly generated their barriers (e.g. fragmented governance, rigid heritage laws, high unemployment rate, etc.) and enablers (e.g. high civic engagement, a nearby university, adaptive grant schemes, etc.) by shuffling the ekip barriers & enablers card deck and drawing three of each. Workshop facilitators may choose to replicate this method or instead have participants hand-select their cards or create their own barriers and enablers based on their specific work contexts.

Innovation Barriers & Enablers Card Deck

• Practical tool

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

One group imagined the ‘Open Speculative Museum’ (OSM ∞), an open-air, commons-based speculative museum offering living heritage deeply rooted in community-preserving practices. Another group imagined ‘Food Storey’, a multicultural public resource food library storing and sharing food, recipes, tools, spices, and most importantly, local community stories based in a local coastal community which has a strong seasonal tourist presence.

Back-casting

Purpose: participants will practice the futures skill of back-casting to ground speculative thinking in the realities of incremental change over time. This activity helps translate visionary ideas into practical steps for implementation.

After creating their speculative CHIs, participants engage in a back-casting exercise to think about what resources they will need, and how they will overcome barriers, to make their speculative vision a reality. Back-casting enables participants to connect their future-oriented thinking with the tangible changes required to move from the “now normal” to the “next normal.” It encourages them to look beyond current skills, challenges, and paradigms to identify the new digital, societal, and environmental processes that would need to emerge to support their envisioned futures.

Using the Back-Casting worksheet, participants focus on questions such as which kinds of institutions they needed to add their innovation ecosystem (e.g. the institutional hackers might need to rely on the expertise of the field builders to help them challenge existing power dynamics), which roles they needed to hire to bring their vision to life, and how exactly they intended to overcome their barriers. The worksheet provides a structured framework to guide this brainstorming and discussion within the small groups.

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

Food Storey (the speculative food library) expanded their innovation ecosystem to include social impact insitutions and schools, while hiring an ESG (environmental, social, and governance)
Specialist along with food experimentalists, chefs, and anthropologists. One of their barriers was that their CHI is in a place that is not active with toursits during off-season months, so they focused their programming to heavily target the local community and grocery stores during the Winter months. The biggest question for them became, how do they measure impact within their community in a meaningful and experimental way?

KEY Learning Wrap-Up

The workshop concluded with a wrap-up exercise asking participants to reflect on one action they would be committing to going forwards from the workshop, one question they were taking away with them, and one connection they had made in the workshop or would be making as a result of the workshop. This step is critical for ensuring participants make the most of their key learning outcomes from the session and carry their skills, knowledge and connections forward with them as they leave the workshop.

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

Participant action commitments included:

• Developing our network to bring a variety of stakeholders into the skills CHI
• Train speculative archivists and philosophers
• Reflecting on heritage within a forward-thinking sector as a way of valuing the work that’s done

Participant questions included:

• Participants’ questions included:
• How can we help funding in the cultural sector to help institutions innovate?
• What policy frames do we need to realise this kind of speculative heritage institution?
• How to truly engage communities in the CHI and in cultural activities in
• general? How to keep that engagement high?

Participants’ connections included:

• Local community: build it and strengthen cooperation
• I would like to have a session with my colleagues about how we work together and what role we want in society within our organisation
• Networking with organisations that have strong connections with local communities is pivotal.