Rudman Consulting designs, develops and delivers national and regional digital development programmes for the creative, cultural and tourism sectors.

Why the need for programmes of digital development support?
Rudman Consulting knows it is critical that the creative and cultural sectors not only keep up with digital developments – but that they successfully develops their own, suitable to their content, audiences and aspirations! We have found specifically that small to medium sized creative organisations are most likely to benefit from digital developments, but are limited in their capacity to embrace change. Put simply, their current knowledge base, limited staffing capacity and scale means that many cannot sustain new digital developments alone.

Rudman Consulting believes that digital development is a key driver to sustaining resilient 21st century creative and cultural organisations. Digital technology is transforming the relationship between artist and audience, arts organisations and places, art and the creative economy. As digital technologies and art forms converge, so do the assumptions about who is an artist, what is a digital business. In the past, it was assumed that the arts were purely a research and development function of the creative economy, or an enhancement element to places where creative economies flourished. Now, the arts are beginning to be recognised for their full economic and social potential They are:
• equal partners in the creation of aesthetic quality and tastes;
• trusted channels the general public like;
• incubators for and homes of creative talent; and
• they leverage mass participation and dialogue.

AmbITion England champion and BBC Broadcaster, Bill Thompson, suggested that organisations most likely to thrive in the 21st century were those that were moving from a position of ‘assimilation’ (where the digital is assimilated into existing modes of thinking) to ‘adaptation’ (where existing thinking is changed to accommodate the new possibilities and potential of the digital).

Rudman Consulting is also championing the emergence of a digital content ecology, where the best content is created by the arts/culture/creative sectors collaborating with the digital/media industries. This demands that creative and cultural organisations adapt rather than assimilate, and it means that different types of collaboration have to be encouraged to ensure innovation. Rudman Consulting’s experience is that creative, cultural and tourism sector organisations and individuals also need to adapt to the opportunities presented by the now embedded philosophies of openness and sharing.

Rudman Consulting has developed AmbITion as a solution, designing a programme of support activities that enables wider access to a specialist knowledge base (technologists, digital media professionals and innovators); supports skills development & providing tools for sectoral capacity building; and through partnership, facilitates content production partnerships and innovation.

AmbITion is led by Hannah Rudman of Rudman Consulting, and is run in partnership with cultural sector organisational development delivery agencies, and those agencies that invest in the creative industries. Rudman Consulting has so far delivered AmbITion programmes with a total value of over £3.1m.

Interested in a digital development programme for the creative, culutral or tourism sectors in your country/region?
Email us to enquire.