I spent most of this morning slowly thumbing throught the executive summaries of applications for the Ideas Tap Innovation and Edinburgh funds. I say slowly thumbing not because there is a lot of reading to do, the summaries are limited to 100 words, but because the wesite really is a mess. The entire thing seems to be crippled by JavaScript. You can’t open summaries, or “responses” as they are called in some parts of the site, in different browser tabs because they are all tied back to original query meaning that trying to get any grasp of what the applications contain, there are 180 for the Edinburgh fund alone, is near impossible.

I did spend enough time on the site to see that there are some very interesting applications. I admit that I spent more time on the Edinburgh fund’s pitch page as the Innovators Fund offers applications from just about everything under the sun and seemed to include a lot of applications from the film and TV development side of the industry.

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The BBC are reporting this evening that the troubled Royal Bank of Scotland, getting ready to sell a fifth of their business, are also going to be drawing their purse strings when it comes to sports and corporate sponsorship.

The original article is linked here

Some of the numbers are pretty staggering, and although they are not listed in the BBC article this evening’s 6 o’clock news gave viewers an idea of some of the figures involved.

The BBC’s Sports Ambassadors, including stars such as Andy Murray, cost the business around £200m.

The RBS 6 Nations receives funding in the region of £20m although this relationship has only recently been resigned and is expected to run until 2013.

The F1 William’s team is the big focus of the article this evening with funding in the region of £20m expected to be dramatically cut.

But where does this leave the performing arts in its relationships with big business? The boom years have seen many organisations adjust to fund their artistic activities through sticking a few corporate banners around the place.

In another article in this weekend’s Observer, linked here, Venessa Thorpe covers news from Arts and Business that a third of business who give more than £1m last year are expected to slash budgets this year.

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