Haidee Bell

Haidee Bell comes from UK innovation agency Nesta, an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. Haidee has worked at Nesta for 5 years in designing and leading interventions to accelerate the creative economy. This includes supporting creative and digital businesses to scale, through targeted support for start-ups and for growing businesses, finding ways to deliver more using creativity and technology in priority public services and creating new networks for innovation by bringing together people from different backgrounds.

Over the past 15 years, Haidee’s creative work has encompassed moving image, publishing, design, festivals, cultural heritage, performing and visual arts. She was a founding partner of the association Audiences Europe Network, the first European partnership to explore audience engagement with culture across the continent. She is currently working with a network of ten cities across Europe who are exploring open and user driven innovation in the public sector to understand how emerging internet services will play a role in transforming cities.

Haidee is a Fellow with the British Council International Leadership programme through which she spent a year studying open innovation in the cultural sector: how organisations and artists are disrupting traditional models of audience engagement with culture in favour of more crowd-led, open approaches.