Dr Suzanne R Black, CRAIC, Loughborough University London, and CoSTAR Foresight Lab
Introduction
This essay addresses gaps and challenges in quantifying and understanding innovation through research and development (R&D) in the creative sector. It takes as a case study the Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP, 2018-2023), which was an experiment in industrial R&D, and focuses on the data collection strategies implemented by that programme’s funders, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The aim of this research is to see what lessons could be learned and, ultimately, to inform a process of data collection for a new, more substantial, UKRI investment programme, the CoSTAR Network.
The CoSTAR Network is a £75.6m investment by the UKRI Infrastructure Fund, delivered by the AHRC to undertake and analyse R&D in the area of convergent technologies for the gaming, TV, film, performance, and digital entertainment sectors. Within the network, the CoSTAR Foresight Lab is specifically tasked with researching the adoption, use and impact of these new technologies by gaining insight into current trends and using foresight methods to predict future directions of activity and priorities in this space. These insight and foresight activities require data, and part of the Foresight Lab’s work involves sourcing, creating, combining and evaluating datasets for this purpose. At the outset of the project, we envisaged the other four CoSTAR Labs (the Live, National, Realtime and Screen Labs) as being a source of valuable data across the UK, and we therefore set about planning how best to capture useful data from those Labs.
Data collection challenges
There are known difficulties with understanding and quantifying innovation and R&D within the creative industries. To begin with, neither creative R&D nor the relationship between innovation and R&D have agreed-upon definitions, and indeed the boundaries of the creative industries are somewhat fuzzy. These difficulties have been noted before in work outlining the challenges arising from accessing suitable data about the creative industries, a lack of standards for the data that is made available, understanding of how this data can be used to measure innovation, and understanding the multiple moving parts of creative ecosystems and their stakeholders. The specific dimensions of the Creative Industries, for example the large number of freelancers and start-ups operating in this space and the fact that many funded projects are short-term, lead to challenges with data capture and analysis, which might result in intricacies in defining whether a company or individual should be counted and, at best, inconsistencies across datasets. Further, the tendency to understand the Creative Industries in terms of a number of place-based ecosystems means that the fluidity of resources around the creative sector can be difficult to record consistently.
Creating an evidence base for innovation through R&D in the Creative Industries faces challenges given that established comparable data sets still need to be developed, agreed-upon data standards still need to be developed, and the complexities of capturing information from interconnected networks of stakeholders.
Learning from the Creative Industries Clusters Programme
As a starting point in understanding the data and analysis of that data about R&D with convergent technologies, and to support our ambitions of collecting data from the other CoSTAR Labs, the CoSTAR Foresight Lab looked to the previous large-scale R&D programme delivered by the AHRC, the Creative Industries Clusters Programme and their data collection strategies, to see what lessons could be learned.
Between 2018 and 2024 through the Creative Industries Clusters Programme, nine Creative Research & Development Partnerships (CRDPs) were funded by the AHRC as part of the UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF). These CRDPs involved collaborations between academia and industry, each forming a place-based ecosystem with funding to support creative R&D. The CRDPs were obligated to report certain data points to their funder, and the opportunity to collect standardised data over five years provides a chance to research how to effectively collect data about creative R&D.
Now that the programme is over, we set out to assess how these data-collection activities transpired, in retrospect, by conducting interviews with the leaders of the CRDPs about their understandings of R&D in the creative industries, their reflections on reporting and data relating to creative R&D, and where they saw successes and failures, both by their CRDPs and the designated reporting mechanisms. The full results of this study will be published in a forthcoming journal article; here we offer a brief insight into those findings.
What is creative R&D?
In order to effectively provide an evidence base for innovation through R&D in the creative industries, we need shared understandings of what constitutes creative R&D, what success in creative R&D looks like, and data capture methods that enable the measurement of that success.
There are ambiguities in the definition of the creative industries as it is often not seen as a single discipline but one with overlapping technologies and sectors. Creative R&D is similarly unclear as most understandings of innovation wrought through R&D come from a technology-focused context. The forms of data capture for R&D outside of the creative industries might not be applicable, and this was a worry of the CRDP directors we interviewed who reported that they at first conceptualised creative R&D in technical terms before adapting it to a creative context. Broadening understandings of R&D from technology-based understandings of R&D, like that described by the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, led to an awareness that the inherent creativity of the creative industries meant that research and development activities were embedded in the creative industries, even if they were not always conceptualised in that way.
What does success look like in creative R&D?
The financial value of the UK’s creative industries has been well-established as seen in their contribution to the economy. As well as financial success, the CRDP leaders stressed the importance of measuring success in terms of the social value generated by the creative industries. The two different types of value – financial and social – potentially require different types of measurement. However, as reported by our interviewees, they found that it was not easy to separate social and economic impacts. Rather, they identified a situation where economic impacts were seen as more important because they could be more easily measured and social impacts were more likely to be de-prioritised unless there was also financial success.
How to measure that success?
After establishing how to define creative R&D and what would constitute success in this area, one way to measure this success is to implement mechanisms for data collection and reporting. For these mechanisms to be effective, they need to be based on a common understanding of how R&D operates in the creative industries with agreement around goals and be implemented consistently with buy-in from all stakeholders.
The Creative Industries Clusters Programme, a large-scale, multi-year programme offered the chance to experiment with data collection mechanisms. To this end, the CRDPs were asked by the AHRC to provide data to help measure the success of creative R&D by reporting their activities against a ten-part typology splitting those activities into different types. These types were created using the descriptions of R&D activities the CRDPs anticipated undertaking in their initial proposals.
Lessons learned
Our analysis of the process and efficacy of implementing this typology and of the other reporting mechanisms used by the CRDPs surfaced some challenges with data collection that extend to the wider creative sector. The challenge arising from a lack of consensus over defining R&D as it applies to the creative sector requires some rethinking of what innovation and R&D mean for the creative sector, as well as the establishment of a shared language around these concepts. The difficulty of defining what success means for the creative industries requires clarity on the part of all stakeholders about goals, and how those goals can be assessed.
These concerns can be addressed by drawing on the knowledge and experience of all the stakeholders involved in the creative industries to define measures for success in a co-created approach to R&D data capture and evaluation that harnesses the lessons learned from the CRDPs and attends to non-economic value and the importance of creative ecosystems.
Despite these challenges, the directors agreed that data collection is valuable and important, leading to insights and reflection that might otherwise be missed. As an experiment in large-scale, longitudinal data collection about creative R&D, the CRDPs successfully yielded useful information about the suitability of a specific R&D typology, and data collection mechanisms around creative R&D more widely, providing multiple points of guidance for developing future methods.
Future Foresight Lab activity
Being guided by the experiences of data collection and the lessons learned in the CICP, the Foresight Lab has embarked upon multiple strategies for the gathering and analysis of data around the creative industries, though the Lab’s focus is not limited to understanding creative R&D.
The various members of the Lab have so far utilised a variety of data gathering and analysis methods, tailoring each to the research question at hand. The report ‘AI in the Screen Sector: Perspectives and Paths Forward’ explores the overall impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) across the UK’s screen sector using data gathered from interviews with experts across relevant domains, surveys and desk research, which was mapped using the three horizons framework. ‘Sustainability Impacts of Convergent Technologies in the UK Creative Industries’ addresses the consequences for sustainability arising from the convergent technologies of virtual production, virtual spaces, artificial intelligence, and new forms of hardware and wearables by employing qualitative and quantitative methods for gathering data via horizon scanning and identifying emerging trends with attention on the whole ecosystem of creative production. ‘Certain Uncertainties’ sought to identify and contextualise the forces affecting the world in which CoSTAR and the wider creative sector’s activities are unfolding by using environment and horizon scanning, iterative frameworking, and feedback loops with stakeholders within and outside of the Foresight Lab. The report ‘UK Innovation in Immersive XR Technologies for screen, performance and digital entertainment’ provides an overview of the UKRI-funded landscape of convergent technologies over the last 20 years, focusing on their implementation in the areas of screen, performance and digital entertainment. This report was compiled using data from the UKRI database of all its funded projects since 2006: Gateway to Research.
These analyses and reporting activities by the Foresight Lab have approached data collection in the creative industries from different angles, using expert-led interviews, surveys and focus groups, scanning existing literatures (news media, industry-produced grey literature, academic publications, and policy documents) for priorities and trends, and accessing available datasets. By bringing so many voices into the research process, the Foresight Lab’s reports, when taken as a whole, work to address some of the difficulties surfaced in our review of the CRDPs’ data collection mechanisms: working towards shared understandings of what it means to successfully innovate in the creative industries in the emerging area of convergent technologies with an awareness of the multiple and complex forces that shape the many creative ecosystems in operation at the present time.
The Foresight Lab’s future research outputs will further expand upon the individual topics salient to the creative industries as well as making connections across those topics to provide a fuller picture.
Please see the CoSTAR Network website for the Foresight Lab’s latest outputs.