IENgine: developing a subscription-based membership application to connect live/location-based immersive experience, (LIE) creatives with employers.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The Immersive Experience Network, (IEN) was established in December 2021 to consolidate and serve the live/location-based immersive experience, (LIE) sector in meeting challenges, developing innovation, accessibility, credibility, visibility, and sustainability. IEN has now reached a phase in its evolution where a more sustained and stable revenue stream is needed to accelerate and expand our activity to realise our ambitions more fully as a company. My proposal to achieve that ambition is threefold: firstly, to become up-skilled as an academic-entrepreneur through the ARC Accelerate training programme and mentorship, secondly to develop a more community responsive beta version of the membership platform, IENgine and lastly to IENgine with our beach-head membership of over 3000 LIE creatives, employers, and associated services. With the support of the ARC Accelerate funding I anticipate that IENgine will swiftly become the 'one stop shop' for employers to find creative immersive talent, for LIE creatives to secure employment, commissions, reach audiences, document their work and find collaborators.Secrecy has been a central trope of LIE since its emergence as a DIY, pop-up, sub cultural phenomenon which has made it challenging for new artists to enter the sector and for audiences to access the work because it happens outside of the usual cultural institutions, venues and organisations where art and culture is usually found. It has created:1. a lack of visibility for the work making it hard for audiences to find LIE easily.2. a skills gaps because it is difficult for new and emerging creatives to access training, industry experience and employment opportunities because the sector is currently very insular with many creatives accessing jobs through personal connections. Brands and household IPs are now regularly developing large-scale activations and encounters for mass audiences but are struggling to recruit the volume of creative talent to realise their ambitions.IENgine will be a cross between Spotlight and LinkedIn, hosting LIE creatives, services and business profiles. It will be able to host interactive, creative portfolios; be searchable with sector specific terminology and parameters. For:3. LIE creatives having a membership profile will provide access to their portfolio of work to employers, producers, funders, and investors in a way that links across their body of work. 4. LIE services and associated businesses will be able to detail their offer, supported by interactive tools and demos of their services. It will present an opportunity to market their business to their core customer-base and users.5. LIE Employers, Producers, Funders & Investors will be able to search for both talent and services in one place, accessing creative portfolios, demos, and samples. It will become the key recruitment tool for the LIE sector.The ARC Accelerate programme will provide training and mentorship that I will enable me to extend and enrich my own commercialisation toolkit within the context of a supportive cohort of academic entrepreneurs and through the guidance and insight of mentors. It will be an opportunity to ring-fence my time and energy for developing a sound business model for what I see as IEN's foundational revenue stream, the membership platform. Launching the IENgine would bring in regular revenue which would transform the capacity of IEN to serve its membership through research, knowledge exchange, learning resource and networking opportunities. The funding would support the final development of the wire frames into a fully functioning, branded web-based platform. It would also enable IEN to test the platform with the beach-head membership not just for its functionality but also to assess its value to the different customers-bases and users, which would enable IEN to pitch the subscriptions at the right level for those various user groups.