Innovation today is not just a matter of engineering; it is a matter of engagement; trust, imagination, and relevance are as essential as technical capability when bringing new ideas to life. These qualities cannot be engineered in isolation. They are cultivated through co-creation, and one of the most powerful but underutilised arenas for this kind of collaboration is culture.
Artists and cultural institutions’ ability to provoke, reframe, and connect ideas emotionally and imaginatively makes them powerful collaborators in innovation. When engaged early and meaningfully, the contributions of the cultural sector combined with the resources and scale of tech companies can unlock new thinking, enrich engagement, and generate outcomes that are both creatively resonant and commercially relevant.
As part of our commitment to advancing interdisciplinary collaboration, Boster Group partnered with the inaugural SXSW London festival to host a panel on how to successfully structure these types of partnerships at the intersection of technology and the arts. Moderated by Maggie Schroeder (Senior Account Director, Boster Group), the session brought together Freya Salway (Head of Lab, Google Arts & Culture), Ben Wymer (Head of Global Brand Experience and the Paris AR Studio, Snap), Yinka Ilori, MBE (Artist, Designer and Founder, Yinka Ilori Studio), and Josephine Chanter (Deputy Director, the Design Museum) to discuss what becomes possible when brands and cultural leaders enter the R&D process together.
Doing so requires a shift in how innovation is funded, how cultural partnerships are structured, and how outcomes are defined, but when organisations embrace experimentation and co-creation across disciplines, the resulting insights can have profound implications for brand reputation, commercial strategy, social impact and institutional purpose.
From Left to Right: Maggie Schroeder (Senior Account Director, Boster Group), Freya Salway (Head of Lab, Google Arts & Culture), Yinka Ilori, MBE (Artist, Designer and Founder, Yinka Ilori Studio), Josephine Chanter (Deputy Director, the Design Museum) and Ben Wymer (Head of Global Brand Experience and the Paris AR Studio, Snap)
The R&D Approach
At its best, innovation values curiosity over certainty. When organisations enter partnerships to explore open-ended questions, rather than to control outcomes, they make room for experimentation, insight, and long-term value creation.
This often requires moving away from traditional sponsorship or product development models. As Ben Wymer explained, Snap intentionally removed revenue as a KPI in its cultural collaborations with institutions like the Louvre and the Design Museum in order to prioritise space for creativity and risk-taking. Commercially applicable insights can and do emerge from these projects, but they are not the starting point.
Creating that space for experimentation depends on trust. Yinka Ilori emphasised that brands often come to his studio seeking the joy his work evokes, and to generate that emotional impact, they must allow him the freedom to challenge assumptions. Josephine Chanter noted that this trust strengthens over time, enabling bold applications of new technologies that come out of the “creative tension” between partners.
How can organisations create a partnership structure based on a flexible and fluid brief? For Freya Salway, the most effective collaborations begin with a shared question. For example, one collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor began with the following provocation: Could his 20+ year archive become an interactive creative collaborator using AI? That inquiry launched an iterative process to explore the role of AI as a creative partner rather than a tool, allowing for layered experimentation on both sides.
Tech as a Collaborator
What these collaborations illustrate is a shift in the role of technology itself. Increasingly, it is not merely a delivery mechanism, but a co-creator able to provoke, adapt, and extend artistic processes to unlock both cultural and commercial value.
Generative AI exemplifies this shift. For many artists, such as Wayne and Yinka, it represents an extension of imagination—capable of responding, adapting, and evolving in real time. In Yinka’s recent work with Google Arts & Culture, he used AI to generate original music, allowing him to experiment with an entirely new medium. Institutions like the Natural History Museum are also embracing AI’s potential to accelerate purpose-driven work, deploying AI across centuries of scientific archives to surface insights that may help address climate change, biodiversity loss, and a host of other challenges. Josephine echoed this ambition, suggesting that applying AI to the Design Museum’s archives could surface vital insights into how design shapes human behaviour; lessons which may help address a host of social challenges today.
Immersive tools like AR and XR are enabling similar shifts, particularly for younger creators. Snap’s filters and lenses are not just marketing assets; they are platforms for user-led expression. Throughout its multi-year partnership with the Design Museum, Snap has even developed in-gallery experiences that do not require access to the Snapchat app, lowering barriers to access and enhancing the overall exhibition experience.
This evolving role of technology requires new thinking about what successful collaboration looks like. Who benefits from the outputs? How are risks managed? How is credit assigned? These questions are not barriers to collaboration; they are part of the opportunity. If addressed openly and proactively, they create a foundation for mutual accountability and lasting innovation that can be applied across a variety of revenue-generating contexts.
Creative Tension, Commercial Breakthroughs
The “creative tension” that emerges in these partnerships is not a side effect; it is the primary catalyst for innovation, driving measurable value for both parties. At Snap, for example, insights from cultural collaborations have directly informed commercial relationships, yielding tangible business outcomes. As Ben shared, these connections are strategic, not incidental. Treating these engagements as part of a long-term R&D strategy ensures that applied creativity fuels business growth.
Yinka Ilori’s project, “Dreaming with Flamingos”, developed with Google Arts & Culture, offers a different model of value creation. Using generative AI, the project invites children and families to rediscover lost Nigerian parables through interactive play. As participants solve riddles and create digital artworks, the experience blends technology, cultural storytelling, and creative agency. As Freya explained, this is part of a wider strategy within Google’s Technology and Society Labs: to explore not only how technology can serve society, but how society can help shape the future direction of technology itself.
These partnerships work not because they are transactional, but because they are exploratory. Built on trust and shared curiosity, they generate insight, relevance, and resilience. In a rapidly shifting technological landscape, this kind of collaboration is not a luxury. It is a necessary foundation for future innovation.