From Vision to Innovation: Exploring the role of Art-Tech Collaboration for Ethical and Sustainable Futures.

The current innovation landscape, shaped by digital transformation and increasing complexity, forces businesses and innovators not only to enhance their technological and innovation capacities but also to address sustainable and societal challenges. To achieve this, it is essential to rethink creative approaches to innovation, moving beyond traditional human-centered frameworks that often lack future-oriented and inclusive visions. Instead, a more holistic conception of innovation - one that prioritizes planetary well-being and future generations - is needed. Collaboration between art and technology emerges as a promising avenue, enabling artists and companies to collectively design sustainable solutions and contribute to societal and environmental impact. While such collaborations offer significant opportunities, they are often hindered by challenges. A key obstacle is the absence of a strategic, vision-led process, when such initiatives frequently implemented in an ad hoc manner. This article explores the potential of Art-Tech collaboration for innovation driven by a futures-thinking approach, grounded in the Horizon Europe MUSAE project. The project seeks to overcome collaboration challenges by defining a novel model - the Factory Model - which leverages futures thinking to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue between arts and technology. To achieve this, the Factory Model was developed based on the Design Futures Art-driven (DFA) methodology, along with the training and mentoring formats for the participants. Two art-tech residencies were conducted to test the model, involving 23 artists and 11 SMEs. As a result, twelve future scenarios and eleven future-driven concepts were developed on the theme of Food as Medicine. The art-tech experiments highlighted the value of future scenarios created by artists to anticipate changes through researching current trends and signals, and then crafting future scenarios, featuring future personas and artifacts. This approach grounded in trend research makes future scenarios tangible and comprehensible for SMEs, opening up for them a broad spectrum of possibilities for innovation. Additionally, the experiments underscored the value of future-driven concepts, which were collectively created by artists and SMEs. Future-driven tech concepts fostered innovative ideas to be grounded in ethical, environmental, and social considerations, where artists were fundamental to raising critical questions and assessing the future impact of the technological concepts with the SMEs. This paper concludes that the Factory Model can enhance collective and interdisciplinary intelligence in futures-oriented practices across artists, designers, and SMEs. Moreover, this interdisciplinary framework for collaboration and innovation, rooted in a futures-oriented approach, has the potential to be applied across diverse settings, including tech innovation, education, and research. Thus, the potential of creating future scenarios and future-driven concepts is highlighted as an approach to foster innovation through anticipation of the impacts of technological advancements on people and the planet, storytelling and worldbuilding, collective exploration, and future-oriented outlook in preferable futures.