Establishing a robust knowledge exchange practice between universities and the arts and cultural sectors — spanning across museums and heritage, the creative industries to the third sector, government agencies and policymakers — has become an essential aspect of research and innovation activity within UK universities, with importance placed on building the skills and capacity for collaboration. The underlying challenge is to understand exactly how to carry out knowledge exchange in a way that fits with both the disciplinary practices of arts, humanities and creative industries research, and the ways in which the arts and cultural sector, as defined by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), operates within that space. Responding to this challenge is clearly essential, but how to respond is often hidden in the existing literature: not because it is not recognised as important, but because of the different languages and priorities that exist across the university and arts and cultural sectors. Occasionally, there is also the sense that universities do not always understand and champion the value of research from the arts and cultural sector itself, instead viewing knowledge exchange as a set of metrics that are more transactional with mainly a one-way knowledge transfer rather than a two-way mutually beneficial process of knowledge exchange and creation; however, the literature shows that this is often linked to an evolution of language rather than thought and practice
