A history of Creative R&D in the UK

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Professor Graham Hitchen, CRAIC, Tom Campbell and Ruichao Wang – a collaboration with BOP Consulting

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The history of UK scientific research is complex – encompassing far-ranging policy debates, industries with global markets, shifting political priorities, autonomous and often long-standing institutions, regulatory standards and technological advances. In recent years, creative research and development has emerged as an increasingly important and visible element within this broader narrative, driven by many of these same wider trends, but also with its own very distinct features and dynamics.

It is an opportune moment to summarise and reflect on this story, much of which has taken place over the last three decades.  Invest 2035 , the government’s ‘modern industrial strategy’ identifies the creative industries alongside the likes of clean energy, advanced manufacturing and life sciences as being one of the eight sectors in which the UK is acknowledged to be world leading, and to have the highest growth opportunity. At the same time, the strategy highlights research and development, along with skills, infrastructure, access to finance and other ‘complex issues’ that are seen as being key to unlocking this growth.

Given the government’s ambitions, the study of UK creative R&D is therefore of more than historical interest. The policies and investment plans intended to generate impactful creative R&D and help to grow the wider economy will need to take account of the current landscape. While not as mature as other fields (the Arts and Humanities Research Council was founded in 2005 – having been merely an Arts and Humanities Research Board since 1998 – the Medical Research Council is more than a century old), it still represents a rich, albeit recent, history and ecosystem of research activity, innovation agencies, funding bodies, industry networks and much more. Understanding how these came into place, the role they have played and how they interact will be critical to developing effective policies to best support them.

This document, and the accompanying visualisation (which is being updated on a regular basis), were prepared with support from colleagues at CRAIC and at BOP Consulting. It is not intended as a definitive history so much as a dynamic storyline, highlighting the interactions between industrial R&D, technology development and innovation, and the evolving and mutable nature of public sector support and intervention.

A fuller version of this essay, complete with a timeline of events, programmes and activities, is available here.

Creative R&D visualization, which plots multiple events and programmes between 1994 and 2024 onto a 3-D model showing ‘Creative Industries intensity’ and ‘Innovation intensity’

When does creative R&D begin?

Creative R&D did not begin in 1998 (the year that the first Creative Industries Mapping document was published); nor did it start in 1994 (when the world’s first “cyber café” opened in London, which over succeeding years became a network of spaces for early-stage creative digital R&D). But it was at around this time that it started to become formalized, with a more considered and joined-up approach. 

Up until the mid-1990s, the concept of research and development in the Creative Industries did not really exist in the sense of being a recognizable field. Although before then there were no policies that explicitly identified the creative industries as an industrial sector, and therefore no corresponding funding streams or research programmes, creative R&D did of course still take place. Within higher education, there was no equivalent to MIT’s renowned Media Lab, but by the early 1990s there were well-regarded courses in digital arts at universities such as Middlesex and Bournemouth, and pioneering academics were collaborating on research projects – the Hypermedia Research Centre at Westminster University, for instance, brought together graphic designers, media producers and social scientists interested in digital technologies, and would hold events and coding classes at the first cybercafes that were springing up in London.

Many of the key researchers, whether academics or in industry, were working in isolation. Individual academics would be based within university departments, such as computer science, which were often not amenable to multi-disciplinary research, while even the very largest creative businesses were unlikely to see themselves as being research-intensive organisations. There was little in the way of a wider community of creative researchers, while the kinds of structures and product development pathways that were established in industries such as pharmaceuticals or electronics did not yet exist.

Almost certainly, the British creative institution in this period with the strongest tradition of R&D is the BBC, which has had a dedicated research department since the 1930s. For much of the 20th century, the BBC was integral to advances in broadcast, sound production and camera technology. Its Radiophonic Workshop is legendary for its experimental work in sound engineering, while the BBC’s Natural History Unit has been at the forefront of developing such technologies as thermal imaging, time-lapse and high-definition television. Aside from the BBC, there were only a handful of corporations undertaking similar R&D at any kind of scale. Notable was EMI’s Central Research Laboratories where important audio-visual technologies were developed including early LCD displays, stereo sound and the first scanners. Our more detailed timeline begins with the BBC.

1994-2003: The Invention of the Creative Industries

The mid-nineties marked the crucial point in which the creative industries came to be recognised by government and by businesses themselves. The defining moment was the publication by DCMS of the Creative Industries Mapping Document (actually a set of mapping documents) which introduced the concept of a set of connected industries that “have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property.” More than this, it named thirteen sub-sectors, ranging from advertising to TV and radio, as constituting the creative sector – and in so doing, initiated twenty years of arguments about what should, and should not, be included.

Even as the creative industries were being defined and classified, they were also changing and converging, as digital technologies began to impact on the production and distribution of creative content. The rise in personal and business internet use and the accompanying dot.com boom meant that there were now substantial audiences and consumers of interactive media, along with nascent online advertisers. Creative experimentation and even some commissioning was being driven by new production tools and cross-platform formats. Television producers, web designers, script writers and games programmers were starting to collaborate on joint projects and see themselves as belonging to overlapping industries: the trade body BAFTA initiated interactive entertainment and games awards, to run alongside its well-known film and TV awards.

The growing importance of convergence and cross-sector innovation was recognised by government, which had included software as one of the thirteen creative sub-sectors. In 1998 it founded NESTA with an endowment from the National Lottery and a mission to foster innovation across science, technology and the arts. The same year saw the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, to sit alongside the other research councils and to support research and postgraduate training in the arts and humanities, while the Arts Council and even the DCMS itself were experimenting with the funding of multi-disciplinary digital arts projects.

But when it came to actual creative R&D, national government was not the main source of investment. Of more importance was the network of regional agencies and devolved executives that were established across the country, with responsibility for economic and cultural development. Many of the creative businesses in this period that secured research funding, accessed business support and training, joined industry networks or went on overseas missions did so as a result of this regional investment. Equally important were the well-resourced and often far-sighted EU programmes which supported small businesses and aimed to encourage both transnational and cross-sector partnerships.

2004-2010: A New Approach to R&D

Since the mid-1980s there had been a distinction in innovation policy between ‘fundamental’ or what is sometimes called ‘curiosity-driven’ research and those R&D activities thought to be more applied , and which are closer to market. The presumption was that the former principally took place within universities and was suitable for government funding, while the latter should be undertaken, and resourced, by industry. This separation proved to be an enduring but, in many ways, unhelpful one, particularly in the case of the creative industries where experimentation and speculative research is often embedded in the commissioning and production process.

While the basic distinction between academic and industrial research still stands, it was in this period that a more sophisticated approach began to emerge. Rather than simply positioning academic versus applied research, a more granular and iterative understanding of the innovation process was required. The broader context to this were concerns regarding the UK’s level of R&D activity – the proportion of GDP spent on total R&D (public and private sector) had been 2.3% in the 1960s but this had dropped to 1.8% by the turn of the century. Consideration needed to be given by government as to how to support innovative businesses, especially SMEs, if it was to stimulate overall R&D investment.

This new approach was exemplified by the founding of the Technology Strategy Board – originally in 2004 as a unit within the Department for Trade and Industry, and from 2007 onwards as a separate public agency. It meant that there was now a dedicated funding body charged with promoting business-led innovation, including the creative industries. Over the next twenty years, the TSB would be a major investor in the design, development and commercialization of innovations in interactive media, electronic publishing, cross-platform production and immersive technologies.

More than just new structures and funding agencies, this was a time of new thinking. There was an increasing recognition that the standard definitions of R&D and innovation metrics used by international governments and policy makers were inappropriate for many sectors and especially the arts and social sciences. In the innovation literature, the paradigms for product development, which had tended to draw heavily on the manufacturing industries were being challenged by broader research that was more reflective of the UK’s predominantly service-based economy.

2005

Alongside the policy debates, it was a period of great expansion in Higher Education across the UK, with a proliferation of new university buildings, departments and multi-disciplinary centres. The dot.com boom may have ended, but broadband internet was being rolled out and the first smartphones were coming to market, spurring a demand for interactive media designers, programmers and digital content producers. Universities and specialist art colleges were setting up degree and masters courses to meet the skills demand but they were also working more closely than before with industry and collaborating with businesses on research projects. Regional development agencies, eager to support start-ups and small businesses in their area, were often willing to provide the funding for universities to develop spin-out incubators, technology testbeds, innovation networks and other facilities to encourage enterprise and knowledge exchange.

2010-2017: Creativity and Innovation

In the aftermath of the financial crash, with a new government and an emphasis on fiscal austerity, there were dramatic reductions in public funding in culture and the creative industries. The regional agencies were dismantled, there were repeated cuts to local authority budgets and dedicated funding bodies such as the UK Film Council were either shut down or merged. However, research was one of the few areas in which public funding was maintained during this period – reflecting a consensus that investment in science, innovation and R&D was crucial to the long-term prosperity of the country.

This included the creative industries, whose continued political importance was seen in the establishment of the Creative Industries Council, co-chaired by the DCMS Secretary of State and composed of leading business figures. The Council took a strong interest in the TSB (now renamed Innovate UK) and the family of new organisations that were emerging at this time, even as regional support was diminishing: the Knowledge Transfer Network, the Digital Economy Catapult and Creative England (later Creative UK).

The continued emphasis on business-led R&D was driven in part by familiar anxieties that the UK’s creative industries were failing to fully exploit the value of its talent and inventiveness. The global creative economy had recovered from the crash and was growing rapidly, driven by the coming together of telecommunications, media and technology companies, digital production tools and online distribution channels. However, for all the UK’s creative strengths, much of the economic value was being captured elsewhere. Whether it was film and television platforms, music streaming services, social media brands, e-book readers or online gaming, the UK was falling behind international, and especially American, competitors. The government was putting considerable effort into championing ‘Tech City’, the cluster of media and technology companies in East London, but the reality was that it was dwarfed by other global centres – most obviously Silicon Valley, in which there was a nexus of technologists, large businesses, fast-growing start-ups and venture capital at a scale that the UK could not match.

This was spelled out in Innovate UK’s 2013 Creative Industries Strategy. It was almost exclusively concerned with the coming together of the creative and digital economies, and the need for UK-based creative businesses to innovate products and services aimed at global markets. It was accompanied by a substantial and high-profile R&D funding programme, announced by the Chancellor, and focused on cross-platform production and, in particular, the UK’s successful post-production and special effects industries.

Meanwhile, innovation practice as well as policy was evolving. As creative businesses and researchers engaged more closely with technologists, so the methods and R&D processes associated with product design and software engineering became more widely adopted. Researchers trained in the arts or social sciences were taking part in open innovation activities such as hackathons, bootcamps and sandpits. This engagement went both ways: technologists and developers were also eager to learn human-centred design practices, with an appreciation that it was not so much the underlying software but the interface and user experience that had been crucial to the success of market leading platforms.

2017-24: The Creative R&D landscape today

Following the referendum and the UK’s eventual exit from the EU, there was a new urgency within government around industrial policy and strategies to promote economic growth. The UK’s creative industries were an important element of this, having been a rare bright spot in a decade of stagnation and growing at roughly twice the rate of the UK economy as a whole. With research and innovation being seen as key to raising productivity, it meant that within UKRI, the new over-arching body for all of the research councils, creative R&D took its place alongside established research-intensive areas such as life sciences, engineering and energy.

Related to this was a renewed interest in the UK’s economic geography and tackling regional inequalities. The creative industries, like other high-growth sectors, were disproportionally located in London and the South East of England, and contributing to the unease that the benefits and opportunities of the UK’s knowledge economy were not being widely shared. As part of the government’s 2018 industrial strategy, the AHRC’s Creative Industries Clusters Programme therefore represented a major investment in place-based R&D, with nine universities across the UK receiving substantial funds to co-ordinate research and innovation with local businesses and organisations. In tandem with this was Audience of the Future – £40m worth of Innovate UK competitions in immersive technologies within the fields of art, culture, heritage and entertainment. A notable aspect of this was the £15million allocated to four demonstrators, representing the largest-ever investment in individual creative R&D projects.

By the 2020s, it was possible to think of the creative R&D topography that had evolved over the last quarter of a century as a coherent landscape, underpinned by a strong evidence base and commitment from government. The Creative Policy and Evidence Centre, founded by the AHRC alongside the Clusters, had published extensive research on innovation in the creative industries and helped make the case for R&D tax relief in video games, film/TV and animation. Most ambitious of all was CoSTAR – a £75million national network of research infrastructure intended to develop virtual production and new technologies in the screen and entertainment sectors. Just as important as infrastructure in setting a common agenda is BEYOND which since 2018 has been instrumental in framing challenges and bringing together the UK’s creative technology research community through events, missions and its annual conference.

Now well established within the UK, creative R&D is taking on a broader perspective. At the international level, innovation policy has been increasingly focused around ‘grand challenges’ and missions: the complex societal issues such as climate change, ageing population, urban development and mental health that governments around the world are grappling with, and which the Covid pandemic exposed. With the creative industries taking their place alongside other major sectors, they too are expected to play their part in this, with creative-led R&D becoming increasingly prominent in healthcare, education and a range of other fields. The progress of the last decades is therefore providing the bedrock for sustained and impactful research and innovation, rooted in creativity, but which ultimately is expected to go far beyond the creative industries in the years to come.

 

The full paper, complete with a detailed timeline of activities, is available here.