Measuring creative employment: Implications for

Copyright © eContent Management Pty Ltd. Innovation: management, policy & practice (2009) 11: 190–200.

Measuring creative employment: Implications for innovation policy S TUART CUNNINGHAM ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane QLD, Australia P ETER H IGGS ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane QLD, Australia ABSTRACT Both creative industries and innovation are slippery fish to handle conceptually, to say nothing of their relationship. This paper faces, first, the problems of definitions and data that can bedevil clear analysis of the creative industries. It then presents a method of data generation and analysis that has been developed to address these problems while providing an evidence pathway supporting the movement in policy thinking from creative output (through industry sectors) to creative input to the broader economy (through a focus on occupations/activity). Facing the test of policy relevance, this work has assisted in moving the ongoing debates about the creative industries toward innovation thinking by developing the concept of creative occupations as input value. Creative inputs as ‘enablers’ arguably has parallels with the way ICTs have been shown to be broad enablers of economic growth. We conclude with two short instantiations of the policy relevance of this concept: design as a creative input; and creative human capital and education. Keywords: creative industries, trident, innovation policy

1. DEFINITIONAL

AND DATA

CHALLENGES

T

here is no question that definitional wrangling over what counts as creative industries has limited its uptake. There is almost exasperation in Simon Roodhouse’s survey of what he calls the ‘tortuous and contorted definitional history’ of the arts, cultural and creative industries (Roodhouse 2001: 505). There are contending analytical and statistical categories such as copyright industries, content industries, cultural industries, digital content, the arts or entertainment industries, and more. This category confusion means that it is difficult to gather accurate, authoritative and

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timely data about sectors and that it is subject to unfocused analysis and intervention. A survey of the data challenges faced by the creative industries notes the ‘extremely difficult statistical measurement issues to overcome’ (Pattinson Consulting 2003: 6). These issues are part of the broader challenges of measuring effectively domains undergoing substantial change through the progressive convergence of the computer, communication, cultural and content industries. This is the subject of a growing academic and policy literature (e.g. Burns Owens Partnership et al. 2006; Pattinson 2003; Pratt 2000, 2004, 2008; Wyszomirski 2008). New hybrid occupa-

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Measuring creative employment: Implications for innovation policy

tions and industry sectors emerge that do not comfortably fit into standard statistics classifications. The 10–15 year gap between updates of these classification schemes means there is almost no comprehensive, standardized employment or industry data available during the critical emergence period of many sectors. Measuring the production and purchasing of physical products is difficult enough but measuring the number, size and value of the delivery of services is an order of magnitude more difficult. The challenges in seeking to measure the flow-on impact of emergent digital creative industries services to other sectors of the economy are even greater. Having readily conceded the degree of difficulty – one faced by all jurisdictions, supra-, inter- and sub-national as well as national – it must also be said that progress is being made on better data that is statistically robust and of value in the development of policy (see Higgs & Cunningham 2008). Productive effort has been made at the intergovernmental level at organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Science & Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). At the national level, there have been substantial mapping exercises in the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, France and in other locations at the sub-national and local levels. Specific sectors of the creative industries have been the focus of concerted work to map their size and impact on the wider economy (for example, design in Ontario, Victoria, New Zealand and the UK). And at the cutting edge of policy-relevant data analytics, there is progress being made on defining the ‘creative economy’, which can be taken to mean the contribution which the creative workforce and/or the creative industries sectors themselves are making to their national or regional economies (Bakhshi, McVittie & Simmie 2008; Higgs,

Cunningham & Bakhshi 2008; Higgs, Cunningham & Pagan 2007a,b). The data challenges faced by policy makers and analysts seeking to grasp the size, growth rates, economic impact and links with the wider economy of the creative industries are an integral part of the productive ferment evidenced as economies and societies undergo rapid change due to digitization, convergence, the growth of knowledge-intensive services and services-based economies more generally. The very difficulties are themselves an indicator of significance.

2. CASE

STUDY: M EASURING CREATIVE EMPLOYMENT

This case study summarises work undertaken for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in Britain, documenting a mapping exercise of the UK creative workforce using the so-called ‘Creative Trident’ methodology (Higgs et al. 2008). This is part of NESTA’s program of research which is building a methodological and evidence base for the role that creative industries might play in innovation, and the policy implications of such a link. Other NESTA studies analyse business-tobusiness links between the creative industries and firms in other sectors of the economy (Bakhshi et al. 2008). The importance of ‘soft’ innovation – constant improvement in services, processes, responsiveness, and functional as well as experiential design that affects potentially every member of society – comes to prominence (Stoneman 2008). Revealing the ‘hidden’ innovation in advertising, independent broadcasting, games and product design sees them ‘emerge as particularly innovative enterprises, in terms of technological and wider innovation’ (Miles & Green 2008). The ‘creative industries’ is the collective term for those businesses in the economy which focus on creating and exploiting symbolic cultural products (such as the arts, films and interactive games), or on providing business-to-business symbolic or information services in areas such as architecture, advertising and marketing and

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Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs

design, as well as web, multimedia and software development. In a practical sense the creative industries are defined by a selection of Standard Industry Codes (SIC) that are implemented in national datasets that encompass the specialist businesses that produce creative goods or services. As we have argued, policy understandings of the creative industries have been hampered by the lack of a consistent definition of creative activity. The number of occupation groups has grown as the professions themselves have evolved. We identify 20 in the 1981 and 1991 household censuses in the UK but 26 in the 2001 census which include: town planners and graphic designers; advertising managers and furniture makers; actors and librarians; journalists; software professionals; architects and archivists. But of no small significance are those working in creative occupations who do not work in the creative industries. There are more creative jobs outside the creative industries than creatives working in the creative industries. Originally developed in 2005 for application to Australian data, the Creative Trident methodology differs from previous attempts to measure creative activities in three key respects: it uses population data (the number of people employed in each occupation within every industry) to provide more accurate estimates; it employs a conservative approach to the selection of ‘creative’ occupations and industries, to avoid overreach and enable better comparability between the segments and to the economy as a whole; and it allows, for the first time, estimation of creative incomes. The purpose of the mapping was not to replicate the official DCMS definition but rather an exploratory exercise to apply a critical outsider’s eye to the available UK employment data.

The Creative Trident In comparison to Australian and New Zealand census collections, UK census data are problematic in terms of timeliness, the level of detail in 1

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industry classifications, and the exclusion of earnings data. We employ the Creative Trident methodology to a combination of UK census and Labour Force Survey data1 by applying a definition, comprising selected occupations and industries, to analyse detailed data. This contains counts of the number of people employed, and where possible their mean income, in every occupation across every industry. The methodology constructs aggregate counts of individuals employed in specialist, support and embedded modes and provides detailed counts according to the level of occupational and industry detail available. Definitions of the three modes analysed are: 1. Specialist mode: Those people in defined creative occupations employed within the defined creative industries; 2. Support mode: Those people employed within the defined creative industries who are not working in the defined creative occupations but perform the essential sales, management, secretarial, accounting and administrative functions; 3. Embedded mode: Those people employed within the defined creative occupations who are working outside the defined creative industries. The Creative Trident methodology can be applied using any well-articulated definition of activities (for example, cultural, creative or even financial services). However, it works best when there is a concentration on what we call the ‘precreation and creation’ stages of the value chain, which we refer to collectively as the ‘creative core’. Concentrating on these stages means that we capture the essential starting points for creative activity, whether in the creative industries themselves (i.e. the specialist mode) or in the wider economy (the embedded mode). While this is a different approach to that of the DCMS Economic Estimates, it employs a selec-

Office of National Statistics, UK Census 2001 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/product_definitions.asp and the UK Annual Population. Survey based on the LFS 2001 to 2006. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=1537




tion strategy very similar to Layer One of the fivelayer generic supply chain concept proposed by Frontier Economics (2007a). Frontier Economics suggests that the level of creativity declines from Layer One to Layer Five, and that Layer One is the most appropriate to use for most benchmarking purposes. Our definition of the creative core (corresponding closely with that employed by Frontier Economics 2007b) selects the activities, in either occupation or industry classifications, which occur at the pre-creation stage (including preservation, access, collecting and licensing activities), and the creation stage of the value chain. In the creation stage, we follow Throsby’s (2001) notion of ‘creative workers’, defined as those: • engaged in producing primary creative output for example, writers, musicians, visual artists, film, television and video makers, sculptors and craftspeople; • engaged in interpretive activity for example, performers interpreting works of drama, dance, music etc. in a wide variety of media from live performance to digital transmission via the Internet; and, • supplying creative services in support of artistic and cultural production for example, book editors, lighting designers, music producers, etc. While Throsby’s definition is essentially occupation-focused, deriving as it does from cultural employment, it may also be applied to industrydefined activities and services. Our core definition of ‘creative industries’, we believe, establishes a justifiable demarcation between specialist and embedded employment, while our core definition of ‘creative occupations’ makes the measurement of embedded employment more robust. The effects of this more restrictive selection on total employment data are mitigated by the fact that the methodology, relying as it does on two-dimensional occupation within industry employment datasets, still counts the employment of those in creative occupations, regardless of whether or not they work in the creative industries as defined.

The Creative Trident represents an advance on previous creative industries mapping approaches because it: avoids the tendency to overreach; disaggregates creative employment effectively and with resulting insight; allows for the decomposition of specialist and support employment within creative industries; and uses population-based data sources rather than surveys, whenever possible.

Applying the Creative Trident to UK data There are limitations in the available UK data which constrain the robustness of quantitative analyses of creative employment, including the Creative Trident. No single dataset reliably provides the basic information required and there is limited coverage of the self-employed. Additionally, census data is only collected at ten-year intervals; there is low resolution of classifications, especially by industry; and the UK census excludes individual incomes. This contrasts with census methodologies in, for example, the US, Australia and New Zealand. The major limitations of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for our purposes are that: it constrains multi-dimensional analysis mainly to sub-totals except for very high employment occupationindustry combinations; there is recently improved but still low resolution of classifications, especially by industry; there is no income data available for the self-employed; and there are inconsistencies between the census employment data at detailed levels.

Results This is a summary of results for the UK employment trident, incorporating specialist, support and embedded creative employment for 1981, 1991 and 2001; growth rates in creative employment; the Creative Income Trident (the levels of creative earnings for specialist, support and embedded creative workers from 2001–2006) and growth in creative employment and earnings is compared with economy-wide averages for the relevant periods.


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UK Creative Employment Tridents: 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2006 Table 1 shows that at the time of the 1981 household census there were approximately 900,000 people in creative employment, representing 3.9% of the workforce. Of these, almost half were employed in specialist businesses working in the creative industries. Those working in specialist creative occupations represented only 35% of the employment in creative industries. The remaining people in creative employment – those working outside the creative industries – represent 74% of those in creative occupations. However, it is quite likely that a significant degree of this ‘embedded’ employment is due to the limited ability of the industry classifications used over the period to capture many of the newer specialist creative business activities. By 1991 the number of people in creative employment had risen to over 1.1 million. Growth in the number of specialist creative occupations in the creative industries appears to have been particularly marked and this growth cannot be discounted as classification artefact as these hardly changed over the period. Creative employment increased substantially between 1991 and 2001, rising to almost 1.9 million people, or 7.1% of the UK’s workforce.

Employment within the creative industries amounted to 1.2 million people, representing 66% of total creative employment. Again, growth appears to have been particularly rapid in the number of specialists employed in the creative industries, but this time in the number of support workers too. Over the twenty-year period between the 1981 census and the 2001 census, creative employment in the UK experienced a cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8%. This is substantially higher than the overall growth in UK employment of 0.8% (Table 1). Between these two censuses, specialist employment, that is, those in creative occupations working within the creative industries, experienced the highest growth rate of all categories, at 6.5%. Over a twenty-five-year period the average annual growth rate of creative employment remains significantly higher at 3.2% than that of the total workforce at 0.8%. Creative employment has grown significantly over the 25 years covered in this study to 7.9% of the workforce, led by the substantial growth in creative specialists. There is lower growth in embedded employment but still at a rate (1.7% per annum on average) that is twice that of the workforce. A significant proportion of the difference between specialist and

TABLE 1: T HE

LEVEL OF SPECIALIST, SUPPORT AND EMBEDDED CREATIVE EMPLOYMENT AND THE WORKFORCE 1981, 1991, 2001 USING CENSUS DATA , AND 2006 USING LFS DATA

Census data Employment

1981

Specialist 157,020 Support 288,850 Subtotal Creative Industries 445,870 Embedded 457,130 Subtotal Creative Occupations 614,150 Creative Employment 903,000 UK workforce 22,866,100 Embedded share of Creative Employment 51% Creative Employment Share of UK Workforce 3.9%

1991

2001

20 year ave growth 6.5% 4.5% 5.3% 1.7% 3.4% 3.8% 0.8%

LFS 2006

285,460 313,440 598,900 524,750 810,210 1,123,650 23,452,230

552,170 690,641 1,242,811 645,067 1,197,237 1,887,878 26,575,775

699,931 585,111 1,285,042 698,244 1,398,175 1,983,286 28,165,612

47%

34%

35%

4.8%

7.1%

7.0%

Source: Analysis by CCI of custom data tables from the Office of National Statistics

194



UK 5 year ave growth 4.9% -3.3% 0.7% 1.6% 3.2% 1.0% 1.2%


embedded growth rates may be due to the outdated industry classifications that were used in the 1981 and 1991 census periods. This had the effect of reducing the specialist employment level (157,020 in 1981) and inflating the embedded level (457,000 in 1981) for those periods.

Creative Income and Earnings Tridents The earnings of people employed in creative occupations and the creative industries can be determined by utilising the mean weekly income data specific to each combination of ‘occupation within industry’, as provided by the LFS survey on the basis of ‘main job’, and combining this with estimates of employment from the Creative Employment Trident. (Unfortunately the LFS does not collect personal income data for the selfemployed, so this had to be estimated.) The resultant tables of earnings are very useful for comparing the contribution of particular creative segments, to other segments, to other sectors of the economy or to the economy as a whole. It is worth noting that the earnings from creative employment from our calculations have risen to almost 10% of the UK total workforce earnings in 2006 much higher than the 7% share creative employment has of the total workforce. By way of comparison the DCMS Economic Estimates report shows the Creative Economy’s share of UK Gross Value Add ranges from 7.7% in 2003 to 7.4% in 2004. The earnings data can also be used to determine the mean annual income of those in creative employment, within the various segments and as a whole. For instance the mean annual income in the UK in 2006, determined by data from the LFS for those in creative employment, was £28,770. This compares favourably with the mean for the UK workforce of £21,060.

Tracing the extent of embedded employed on the broader economy Table 1 showed that almost 700,000 people were employed in the UK in 2006 in creative occupa-

tions outside the industries traditionally classified as ‘creative’ and that this employment is consistently growing at around 1.6% to 1.7% per annum, significantly higher than the general workforce. The detailed two-dimensional datasets used to calculate the Creative Trident allow additional types of analysis which are not possible using single-dimension, occupation-based or industry-based employment datasets so it is particularly interesting to examine the distribution of embedded employment across the whole economy, either at the single-digit ‘division’ level or even at the more detailed two-digit industry level. Between 1981 and 2001 there was a substantial rise in the level of embedded employment across nearly all sectors of the economy (see Table 2). The largest increase in the share was in Division J (Financial intermediation), up from 1.6 per cent in 1981 to 4.6 per cent in 2001, followed by Division I (Transport, storage and communication), where the embedded proportion increased from 0.6 per cent to 2.4 per cent. Only three divisions (K, N and O) showed a decline in the share of embedded creative employment over the period; the most significant of these was the fall from 6.1 per cent to 4.5 per cent in Division K. The right-hand side of Table 2 also shows that for the shorter period 2001 to 2006 and using LFS data, there was no appreciable change in the shares embedded creatives have of Division employment, except in Division L (Public administration), where the figure increased from 2.3 per cent to 3 per cent, and Division K, in which it appeared to rise slightly over the course of the five years. (Similar changes over the past 20 years in Division employment are also seen in Australian and New Zealand Creative Tridents (Higgs & Cunningham 2008).) Embedded employment analysis, useful as it is for revealing gross patterns in the relative demand for creative skills across the economy, immediately raises the question: what are creatives actually doing, and why, in these sectors? With Janet Pagan (Pagan et al. 2008, 2009), we studied the


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Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs TABLE 2: C HANGES IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF EMBEDDED EMPLOYMENT E CONOMY IN 1981, 1991, 2001 AND 2006

ACROSS THE

D IVISIONS

OF THE

UK

Embedded Creative’s share of Division’s employment Census data

LFS data

Division of the UK Economy

1981

1991

2001

2001

2006

A Agriculture, hunting and forestry B Fishing C Mining and quarrying D Manufacturing E Electricity, gas and water supply F Construction G Wholesale and retail trade etc. H Hotels and restaurants I Transport, storage and communication J Financial intermediation K Real estate, renting and business activities L Public administration and defence M Education N Health and social work O Other community etc. service activities P Private households Q Extra-territorial organisation and bodies Not Specified Total of all divisions

0.1% 0.3% 0.9% 3.1% 2.3% 0.8% 1.1% 0.2% 0.6% 1.6% 6.1% 0.6% 1.3% 1.8% 2.7% 0.1% 3.3% 0.4% 2.1%

0.1% 0.2% 2.3% 4.3% 3.4% 0.8% 1.2% 0.3% 1.1% 2.7% 7.0% 0.7% 1.4% 1.5% 3.1% 0.0% 4.3% 0.9% 2.6%

0.9% 0.6% 2.6% 5.3% 4.0% 1.4% 1.6% 0.7% 2.6% 4.7% 4.6% 2.3% 2.1% 1.0% 2.3% 0.4% 4.3%

0.3% 0.0% 2.3% 4.7% 3.4% 1.9% 1.5% 0.4% 2.7% 5.4% 4.1% 2.3% 1.9% 0.7% 1.1% 0.2% 4.1%

0.6% 0.0% 2.3% 4.7% 3.2% 1.5% 1.7% 0.5% 2.2% 5.1% 4.4% 3.0% 1.8% 0.8% 1.3% 0.1% 4.5%

2.7%

2.5%

2.5%

Source: Analysis by CCI of custom Census and LFS tables from the Office for National Statistics

contribution of creative expertise and services to Australian healthcare. This work combined analysis of embedded employment for each of six creative segments with a series of 12 cases studies. The case studies found that creatives are making a range of contributions to the development and delivery of healthcare goods and services, the initial training and ongoing professionalism of doctors and nurses and the effective functioning of healthcare buildings. Creative activities within healthcare services are also undertaken by medical professionals and patients. Key functions that creative activities address are innovation and service delivery in information management and analysis and making complex information comprehensible or more useful, assisting communication and reducing psycho-social and distance-mediated barriers, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of services. 196

3. CREATIVE

INDUSTRIES ARTICULATED INTO INNOVATION POLICY

This research supports a focus shift in policy terms from an emphasis on creative outputs (the creative industries as a specific sector) to creative occupations as inputs into the whole economy, and creative outputs as intermediate inputs into other sectors. This idea of creativity as an economic ‘enabler’ arguably has parallels with the way ICTs were shown to be broad enablers of economic growth in the past. This may facilitate a stronger focus on innovation systems which support the development of the creative economy. In recognising a connection between creative activities across many industry sectors and the innovation process, policy might focus on enhancing the input value of creative activities in the context of industry development and innova-




tion strategies. An indicative range of relevant policy areas might include: • R&D (including tax concession) policies being reviewed to recognise the role of creative inputs into industry innovation. • Facilitating links between creative industry services and the wider economy (perhaps through vehicles such as innovation voucher systems). • Promote the career opportunities available for creatives in the wider economy, based on the notion that creative individuals have great flexibility, found as they are across a wide crosssection of the economy at large. • Promoting the attractiveness of careers in the creative industries, based on the data that show higher than UK average incomes for all but a few sectors. Our findings regarding the embedding of creative activities across the economy, raise the possibility that cross-industry linkages and ‘technology transfer’ due to creative workers, mean that the creative sector may be significantly more involved in the innovation system of national and regional economies than has been recognised before. This may have important implications for innovation policy which has traditionally been exclusively associated with the science- and technology-based industries. We conclude with two short instantiations of these proposals which flesh out their implications for innovation policy.

Design as creative input The notion of creativity as an input to other sectors of the economy has begun to be rigorously tested. Design is recognised as a fundamental input into most products and services in the ‘experience’ economy. Sources such as the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report and the UK Design Council have demon2

strated that there is a distinct correlation between design-intensity in enterprise activity and product development, and broad economic competitiveness at the firm and national level. Additionally, design activity is notoriously underestimated in official national statistics and employed designers are so broadly embedded throughout industry sectors that their contributions are significantly undercounted. There is now some good evidence from the four years of the Better by Design program in New Zealand of the results of their ambitious goals of improving expert performance through design as a crucial value-add to manufacturing, tourism and other export-facing industries.2 Better by Design was established in 2004 to increase New Zealand’s export earnings by assisting companies to grow in international markets and improve their financial performance by the strategic use of design. To achieve this, Better by Design offers a range of services to assist businesses integrate design into all aspects of their operations. The primary objective to drive this mission is ‘5 ⫻ 50 ⫻ 500 ⫻ 5’: ‘In the first 5 years, at least 50 existing businesses made internationally competitive through design leadership, generating an additional $500m per year in export earnings, growing at 5-times targeted GDP to produce $1.5b by year 10’. An audit conducted in 2008 found that the fifty highest performing companies are 3.5% ahead of reaching the targeted goal of an extra $500m in export revenue in five years, and seeing exports grow at 4.5 times GDP. With an integrated set of interventions on the demand side (in manufacturing and among services firms), companies using design inputs are displaying a higher level of understanding of customers and their need and desires, an increased awareness of the role of design in strategic and operational processes, and product and service changes, including improved look and feel partic-

See www.betterbydesign.org.nz. The data on implementation was supplied by Judith Thompson, Director, Better by Design (New Zealand Trade and Enterprise), November 2008.


197


ularly for products from engineering type organisations. There were observable improvements including more integrated product development, branding, increased investment in design and proportion of turnover from exports and overall turnover growth. Kretzschzmar’s (2003) Danish study highlights the importance for policy makers of the distinction between specialist and embedded designers and the linkages between them. The study characterised manufacturers into 4 types: those with no design investment; those with an embedded or internal design department; those who utilise externally purchased design services (specialists); and those with both an internal design department and who also purchase external specialist services. The latter group are shown as having a rate of increase in exports that is twice that of the other three groups. They also had an average annual growth in their gross revenue 22 per cent above the average for Danish companies. The implication is that while buying external or building internal design expertise is worthwhile, the best results come from firms that do both well. But most government industry development programs focus on the specialist firms, in this case design consultancies, while ignoring the internal departments and missing the need for a company, where possible, to have internal design capacity interacting with specialist design consultancies. The Trident employment methodology can help measure the changes in these ratios at the national and regional level for most subsegments while other methodologies such as enterprise surveys would be required to determine the levels within individual firms.

Human capital and education The notion of the creative economy argued for in this paper suggests a human capital model, rather than an ‘exceptional sector’ model, for the importance of creativity in the economy. The theme of human capital in a creative economy allows for an approach to disciplinary training that stresses 198

the distinctive value of each for innovation, moving away from assumed science-based priorities. It also goes to the centre of ‘fifth generation’ innovation thinking, where it is dynamic linkages facilitated by personnel transfer or talent mobility that ensure the ‘flow’ between ‘stock’ in the system. It is the domain where government is on surest ground in defining its role in innovation, through education and training and its derivatives. It is also critical for the way in which it addresses both the supply side and demand side of innovation. There are quite radical implications for formal education here. Education must engender a better rapprochement across the arts and science sectors in research and curriculum. It is critical to delay hyper-specialisation in the upper years of secondary school and lower years of undergraduate education, not simply by enforcing a broad range of subject choice but also the creation of some space for problem-based cross disciplinary approaches is important. At the postgraduate and research training end, the capacity to bring specialisations together in dynamic multidisciplinary formation is equally critical, reconnecting the different knowledge modes. This is not a matter of dissolving disciplinary specificity into a melange of fashionable themes and problems (although at the cutting edge of knowledge we expect to find multiple emergent new disciplines), but a pedagogical and research funding focus encouraging and enabling multidisciplinary teams to work effectively on the big issues facing us. It is about coordination between disciplines rather than necessarily a subsumption of disciplines. Collaboration recognises that many if not most of the countries most important priorities require multiple disciplinary inputs due to their complexity and scale. Human capital development through education is not only about the supply of expertise into the workforce; it is also about the demand for innovation. The demand side goes to the question of absorptive capacity: critically trained, socially aware, sophisticated consumers who con-




nect their buying habits with their identity as citizens, who play a critical role in ‘demanding’ innovation and can cope with, respond to, and absorb innovation. They can appropriate and adapt technologies and new knowledge to their own ends in sometimes surprising, unintended and innovative ways. While it is true that arts and humanities expertise play a well recognised role in ‘slowing down’ scientific progress – insisting on and providing the ethical and other holistic approaches to the social implications and applications of knowledge (e.g. the ethics of Stem Cell Research, biotechnology, GM foods), they can also ‘speed up’ social absorption of innovation by understanding breaking trends, interpreting difficult and complex challenges to belief, custom and practice, giving us the insights and frameworks to understand and absorb change. Design and fashion, for example, ‘speed up’ the absorptive capacity of the consumption base of society, speaking to the demand side as much as the supply side of innovation.

4. CONCLUDING

COMMENT

This paper offers an evidence base contributing to the concept of a creative economy and its potential links to innovation. We argue that policymakers should move beyond sector-specific, output-oriented, approaches. Stronger crossindustry linkages (for example, through design services) and knowledge transfer through embedded creatives mean that the creative industries are potentially more involved in the innovation systems than has previously been recognised. The influence of this focus on linking creative industries and innovation is evident in the UK White Papers, Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy (DCMS 2008) and in Innovation Nation (DIUS 2008). Creative Britain speaks of the need for the creative industries to ‘move from the margins to the mainstream of economic and policy thinking, as we look to create the jobs of the future’. Creative human capital development is arguably the central theme of the paper,

extending to large scale apprenticeship schemes to coordinate better human capital inputs into the volatile and slippery creative economy. There are policies for business development pathways for creative entrepreneurship, including a voucher scheme designed to promote better coordination between demand and supply; and recognition that research and development must underpin the mainstreaming of the creative economy. There are by now a set of policy frameworks, decent evidence and enough practical program implementations to suggest that the link between creative industries and innovation policy can survive robust scrutiny. The logic driving the move from creative industries to creative economy is that the creative industries are not significant only in terms of producing a particular set of products and services, but also because they are engaged in the provision of coordination services that relate to the origination, adoption and retention of new technologies, commodities or ideas into the economic system. They provide, in other words, ‘innovation services’. The research and evidence provided in this paper seeks to prepare an evidence base for such an argument.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Thanks to Dr Harvey May for research and editorial assistance.

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Accepted 17 June 2009


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