Search results

The visualization of ranking information in global public policy is moving away from traditional “league table” formats and toward dashboards and interactive data displays. This paper explores the rhetoric underpinning the visualization of ranking information in such interactive formats, the purpose of which is to encourage country participation in reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper unpacks the strategies that the visualization experts adopt in the measurement of global poverty and wellbeing, focusing on a variety of interactive ranking visualizations produced by the OECD, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the ‘Our World in Data’ group at the University of Oxford. Building on visual and discourse analysis, the study details how the politically and ethically sensitive nature of global public policy, coupled with the pressures for “decolonizing” development, influence how rankings are visualized. The study makes two contributions to the literature on rankings. First, it details the move away from league table formats toward multivocal interactive layouts that seek to mitigate the competitive and potentially dysfunctional pressures of the display of “winners and losers.” Second, it theorizes ranking visualizations in global public policy as “alignment devices” that entice country buy-in and seek to align actors around common global agendas.

This chapter summarises all the results of the section that studied cross-innovation processes between audiovisual media and tourism sectors. It relies first on the review of existing forms of cooperation and cross-innovation between sectors. Second, on the meso-level analysis of structural aspects that shape innovation processes in these sectors. Third, on a micro-level ethnography of a start-up company innovating at the intersections between the film and tourism industries. We learn that there are two core ‘rules’ that motivate sectoral cooperation – first, the broader platformisation of tourism and second, the emergence of augmented reality as a technique to augment experiences at locations. Regarding the second rule especially, we learned that the main innovator and innovation motivator in this area is currently the public sector, driven also by cultural policy goals. But local tourism sector small and medium-sized enterprises appear to not be particularly driven by innovation-orientated cooperation with other sectors.

This chapter presents the many premises of this book. It first discusses the book’s central questions and lays out the design of the large multi-national and multi-method study, carried out across Northern Europe. It also places the book at the interdisciplinary space between contemporary innovation economics and cultural and social theory. It then discusses the complex set of social processes that have conditioned the phenomena that the book studies – how and why are the contemporary audiovisual media industries co-innovating and converging with other sectors including education, tourism and health care? Within this framework, it discusses the effects of the broader individualisation and mediatisation processes, of media convergence, of the emergence of cross-media or transmedia strategies, of the evolution of the service and experience economies and of the emergence of creative industries policy frameworks.

This chapter focuses on clarifying the cooperation and convergence between tourism and audiovisual (AV) sectors in Hamburg and Riga. In light of increasingly easier and more accessible travel, the tourism sector is a growing trend in most countries and regions. To what extent does this affect cooperation with the AV sector? The chapter gives an overview of different types of cooperation in these regions and brings out the main obstacles for innovation. When describing the innovation systems, focus is put on institutional frameworks in these two regions. We end by arguing that raising the demand for innovation in the tourism sector is a real challenge and demonstrating that the public sector plays an important role in driving the cross-innovation processes between the observed sectors.

The chapter concludes the section on cross-innovation and convergence processes between audiovisual media industries and the education sector. It addresses, first, that these processes are not driven by any specific technology, but by two broad and interdependent processes – individualisation that makes people in insecure careers search for personalised learning opportunities and the experience economy that produces expectations for learning experiences to be pleasurable and fun, that is, gamified. The chapter demonstrates the emergence of EdTech as a new dialogic subsector operating between the publicly operating education sector and the private media and information and communication technology industries. It demonstrates the inherent institutional diversity in and around this subsector and discusses the nature of the dialogues constituting it. It, lastly, addresses the risks deriving from global platformisation to the education sector and demonstrates how Estonia’s government-run platforms, effectively cross-innovation systems linking teachers, learners and content providers in dynamic ways, could present feasible alternatives to the global platforms.

This chapter concludes the section on cross-innovation practices between audiovisual (AV) media industries and the health care sector. It suggests that the main case studies discussed in this section – Estonia in general and Aarhus Region in Denmark – tell of two different trajectories on how the emergence of cross-innovation systems can be facilitated by policies. Local policymakers in Aarhus have worked systematically to raise awareness and facilitate contacts between AV media and other sectors and this has resulted in an active start-up scene at the intersection between the media and the health care industries. Estonia, which is focusing on traditional cultural policymaking, has not recognised similar dynamics. Yet, Estonia may be still better prepared for the (global) platformisation of e-health services with its national e-governance systems, while Denmark’s health-related e-services remain fragmented and ripe for platformisation by multinationals, potentially undermining local cross-innovation systems.