Clwstwr: a five-year investment in creative innovation

One of PDR’s biggest ever projects has reached its successful conclusion.

Clwstwr was a Cardiff-based research and development (R&D) incubator focused on helping small and emerging creative enterprises innovate and grow. Representing a multi-million-dollar, five-year collaboration between industry, academia and government, Clwstwr offered creative industry organisations (CIOs) the opportunity to apply for funding and support to develop their ideas from rough sketches to market-ready products and services.

“PDR’s role in the project was to take our extensive experience in design-led innovation and apply it to the creative industries,” said Director of Research Professor Andy Walters. “The aim was to enable organisations to use their creative skills to develop their own innovative ideas rather than just using them in their work for their clients.” He added, “taking a design-led approach, we were able to help creative organisations look at themselves, look at the market and look at their users, and bring their insights together to create new products and services that are of real value.”

“Being part of Clwstwr has been an amazing experience,” said Jo Ward, Senior Designer Researcher, at PDR. “We have seen projects go from seeing R&D and innovation as something of an intimidating unknown concept to feeling like they have permission and confidence in using terms and processes that they have experienced during sessions with us. Success for me hasn’t been the number of projects that have had ‘something’ to take to market, but the number of projects that have come away with learning what is of value through successful research and testing of ideas with their users.”

Was Clwstwr a success?

A short selection of participant comments gives a good indication of the impact the program made:

• “The first PDR session [Ideas Lab] was the best workshop I’d ever been involved in in Wales, and it did make me think a great deal.”

• The biggest impact was “being given language, terminology, and frameworks for things that I already did, but that I’d never been able to put value on. I’d done a lot of R&D, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to name it.”
• “Our R&D journey has been far from a simple straight line. But thanks to Clwstwr our concept is better researched, our narrative is more compelling, and our product will be more marketable.”

After five years, Clwstwr has passed the baton of creative industry innovation to Media Cymru, an expanded regional accelerator in which PDR will continue to play a leading role.