A key contribution of innovation in art and design is in contextualizing, raising awareness of and reflecting on ethical, societal, historical, artistic and cultural discourses. These methods go beyond the scientific practice of measuring and examining innovation in terms of application-oriented requirements.
In this regard, contextualization is used to tap into complex social processes of transformation that are a prerequisite for, an accompanying feature or a consequence of innovation.
The development of new areas of application and target groups in the context of participation is an important driver of social change. Innovative forms of and approaches to education are created in order to reach new and different target groups. In combination with social innovations, these approaches lead to new societal reference points and forms of interaction. This gives rise to creative outputwith an innovative impact. Examples include the creative use or reappropriation of technologies for broadening the audience experience, the active involvement of users and reversed role interpretations, the creation of interactive forms of education through the use of immersive technologies, the experience of performances independent of time and place, and the integration of “gamification” and “citizen science”.
The approaches of performance enhancement and market orientation fall into the category of open innovation. What “inside-out” and “outside-in” have in common is that the place in which knowledge is gained is not necessarily have to be the place in which innovation is created or used. This perspective is also characterized by the fact that the added value in the innovation process is generated by a conscious synthesis of internal and external knowledge and implementation partners.