NESTA research report 2010
NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. NESTA invests in early-stage companies, informs policy, and delivers practical programmes that inspire others to solve the big challenges of the future.
Their report into Creative Clusters, published in November 2010 makes interesting reading for both businesses looking to foster creativity within their organisations, as well as policy makers and planners looking at creativity locally and nationally.
The creative industries are a force for innovation at the national, regional and organisational level. At 6.2 per cent of the economy, and growing at twice the rate of other sectors, the economic importance of the creative industries to the UK are proportionately the largest of any in the world. Nurturing high-technology clusters can also be seen as a way of rebalancing the economy away from the construction and financial services sectors.
The UKs creative industries are more innovative than many other high-innovation sectors, providing a disproportionate number of the innovative businesses in most parts of the country. Analysis of the innovation performance of Britain’s creative industries confirms that they punch well above their weight in terms of innovation across almost all regions in the UK.
NESTA took the concept of creative clusters as a starting point to examine the role that creative industries play in local and regional innovation systems.
Industrial clustering benefits businesses by giving them access to skilled staff and shared services, and the opportunity to capture valuable knowledge spillovers.
Creative firms tend to locate close to each other even more than
most other sectors. Advertising and Software firms often cluster near each other; the same is true of Music, Film, Publishing and Radio and TV businesses.
Creative hotspots
London is at the heart of the creative industries in Britain, dominating in almost all creative sectors, and particularly in the most intrinsically creative layers of the value chain for each sector.
The nine other creative hotspots across Britain are Bath, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Guildford, Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Wycombe-Slough.
Different cities across Britain have different profiles of creative specialisation: cities across the South present more diversity in their range of creative services, whereas Northern and Midlands cities (Manchester excepted) have similar creative profiles.
However, the mere existence of a creative agglomeration is not enough for the benefits from clustering to emerge. The other crucial ingredient is connectivity between firms within a cluster, with collaborators, business partners and sources of innovation elsewhere (both in the UK and overseas), and finally, with firms in other sectors that can act as clients, and as a source of new and unexpected ideas and knowledge. These three layers of connectivity are underpinned by a dense web of informal interactions and networking.
NESTA’s report identified a range of proactive steps that can be taken to help boost creativity internally, locally and nationally;
Look for latent clusters rather than try to build new ones from scratch
Identify whether there are any latent clusters ‘hidden’ in your locality that would benefit from networking and awareness-raising to develop a dense web of internal and external links.
Think about which sectors work well together
There are important synergies between some creative sectors, but not others. Avoid potentially wasteful ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategies for creative clusters that don’t pay sufficient attention to the distinctive needs of different sectors.
Adopt better targeted, and more realistic strategies that focus on ‘building up and connecting’ those sectors that are already present – and are complementary with each other.
Technological innovation is increasing the potential impacts from the creative industries…
The creative industries do not have a monopoly on creativity, but neither do manufacturing and engineering have a monopoly on technological innovation.
Universities should do more to promote innovation in increasingly tech-intensive creative industries
Technology intensive creative industries, for example, have something to gain from tapping into the public research base in their local universities.
In the context of the creative industries, universities tend to be seen mainly as a source of skilled labour. This contrasts with the technology and science-based sectors, where universities are a crucial source of knowledge for innovation, as well as high-growth spinoffs. It is important to ensure that the local creative industries engage more actively with universities to harness research outputs that might enhance their productivity and innovative performance.
Nurture talent, and give it reasons to stay
The presence of a specialised and knowledge-intensive pool of labour is a key factor in business.
Help remove barriers to collaboration
Even if they are aware of each other, local creative businesses may be keen to protect their valuable ideas or client portfolios and be wary of collaborating for fear of disclosing sensitive information.
Capture creative value locally
The generation of original intellectual property (IP) is at the core of what many creative businesses do. Where they retain ownership over their IP, they have more incentives to innovate to exploit it, generating additional revenues that can be reinvested in growth, and building commercial and collaborative relationships with other local firms.
Build bridges as well as towers
Although investments in iconic public buildings can produce undoubted cultural and economic benefits, building links between potentially collaborative businesses and sectors may produce longer lasting impacts.
East London Tech City as the beginning of a new approach for creative cluster development?
The Prime Minister’s announcement (in November 2010) of the East London Tech City set of initiatives, aimed at building up the vibrant high-tech and digital media cluster in Old Street and Shoreditch is a step in the right direction. Rather than trying to create a new cluster from scratch, East London Tech City aims to take an organic, already competitive cluster to the next level, by providing it with the right infrastructure (both physical and digital), and developing its connections with global companies.
