About

Professor Chris Bilton is director of the BA in Media and Creative Industries . He was the Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies from 2008 until 2014. He is also the founder of the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises and was Course Director from its inception in 1999 until September 2008. Chris worked in the cultural sector for ten years before coming to Warwick, touring Britain and Europe as a writer, performer and manager with Balloonatics Theatre Company and working as Arts Development Officer for City of Westminster Arts Council in London. He has been a lecturer at the Centre since 1997.

Research interests

Research interests include: management of creative and media businesses; alternative approaches to organisation, employment and strategy formation in the cultural sector; cultural democracy and community arts; creativity theory; the negative consequences of 'creativity' for organisations and individuals.

I am currently working on two projects, a book about myths of creativity on film, co-authored with Professor Jo Garde-Hansen, and a contributing to co-authored about creative work in Europe. For this I am working with Warwick colleagues Dr Heidi Ashton and Dr David Wright and other international chapters, exploring impacts of Covid, welfare policies and UBI upon creative work and workers. The project builds on my previous work on Warwick's 'productivity and the futures of work' theme - some of the podcasts and videos to the right relate to this.

Currently I am the Warwick academic lead on the CreaTech Frontiers project, a collaboration between Warwick, Coventry, Birmingham and Birmingham City Universities together with the RSC, aiming to build capacity and share knowledge on use of creative technologies in the creative industries across the West Midlands.

My most recent book Creativities: the What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process with Stephen Cummings and dt ogilvie, was published in June 2022. My previous book, The Disappearing Product: Marketing and Markets in the Creative Industries was published in September 2017, exploring the dominance of big tech platforms in the creative industries, and how content creators can reclaim their place in the experience economy. My next book, Cultural Management 3.0, is due out with Routledge in 2023.

I have published and presented papers on policy and management in the creative industries at conferences in Norway, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands and the UK. My most recent books in this field are the Handbook of Management and Creativity, co-edited with Stephen Cummings and published in 2014, and Creative Strategy: reconnecting business and innovation, co-written with Stephen Cummings. Other recent articles have appeared in International Journal of Cultural Policy, Strategy magazine and Management Today.

I completed my PhD, an examination of cultural democracy in the UK and the US from 1870 to 1990, at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies in 1998. I am a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Cultural Policy for which I recently edited a special edition on 'Creativity and Cultural Policy'. My most recent funded research project was the Happenstance Project, in which Ruth Leary, Katherine Jewkes and I were supported by the AHRC, Arts Council England and NESTA to investigate the effects of digital innovation on organisational culture in three arts organisations.

I have run workshops on management and creativity for managers at Warwick Business School and Copenhagen Business School, and for transport and construction companies through the Roads Academy and Highways Agency. I am a founding member of the Warwick Creative Exchange, a network of cultural organisations and Warwick academics aiming to foster knowledge exchange and to facilitate collaborative research.

Teaching and supervision

After twenty years teaching postgraduate students about management and marketing of creative industries on the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises, I am very excited to be teaching on our new BA in Media and Creative Industries. Currently I teach three BA modules: Media Cultural and Creative Industries (year 1); Media and Cultural Management (year 2); Leadership for Innovation (year 3).

I have supervised eleven PhD research projects to completion in the Centre, ranging across the following topics: autonomous work in the Korean television industry; reframing Chinese national identity through the lens of popular culture; cultural entrepreneurship in Birmingham; risk narratives in Mexico; the gendered myth of genius and its effects on female authors; creativity in video games; Chinese television; independent audiovisual production in Taiwan and Britain; the Korean 'wave' in film and TV; multiculturalism in Taiwan. I welcome proposals which relate to my research interests above, but am interested in any imaginative and exciting projects which meet the Centre's overall research criteria.

Current PhD students

• Pengyun Lu: Creating on Platforms - Understanding Platform-based Creative Labour Through Bourdieu's Field

  Analysis (co-supervision with Heidi Ashton)

  Recently completed PhD theses have included: artist-leaders and organisational change in KPop (Dongjoon Lee); creativity and online ideation in the advertising industry (Linda Folk); Chinese cultural identity through media (Hanzhi Ruan)

Selected publications

• Bilton, C. (2023). Cultural Management: a research overviewLink opens in a new window (Abingdon / New York: Routledge)
• Bilton, C Cummings, S and ogilvie, dt (2022) Creativities: the What, How, Where, Who and Why of the creative processLink opens in a new window (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)
• Bilton, C., Eikhof, D. R & Gilmore, C. (2021) Balancing Act: motivation and creative work in the lived experience of writers and musicians, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 27:6, 738-752
• Bilton, C & Soltero, G (2020) Cultural policy as mythical narrative, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26:5, pp. 681-696
• Bilton, C. (2020). Creativity 2.0: new approaches to creative economy work and education in the creative industries. In: G. Hearn (ed.) The Future of Creative Work: Creativity and Digital Disruption (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar), pp. 212-228
• Bilton, C. (2017) The Disappearing Product: Marketing and Markets in the Creative Industries (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)
• Bilton, Chris. (2014) Uncreativity : the shadow side of creativity. International Journal of Cultural Policy 21.2, pp. 153 - 167
• Bilton, C. and Cummings, S. (2014) ed. Handbook of Management and Creativity (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar)
• Bilton, C. (2013) 'Playing to the Gallery: Myth, Method and Complexity in the Creative Process' in J. Chan and K. Thomas (ed.), Handbook of Research on Creativity (Edward Elgar), pp. 125 - 137
• Bilton, C (2012): Happenstance Report (NESTA 2012)
• Bilton, C (2011) (ed.): Creativity and Cultural Policy (London: Routledge)
• Bilton, C. and Cummings, S. (2010) Creative Strategy: reconnecting business and innovation (Wiley)

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Qualifications

• PhD (Warwick)