Creative Industries and Innovation in Europe

Concepts, Measures and Comparative Case Studies

Luciana Lazzeretti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136282898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

In recent years, the study of creativity has shifted from analysis of culture as an end in itself to one of economic enhancement, and its capability to generate wealth and promote economic development. Increasingly, European cities and regions are using the arts to fuel wellbeing and reinvigorate economies after the comparative demise of more traditional industry and manufacturing. A growing literature is starting to highlight the innovation capacity of cultural and creative industries (CCIs) as they intersect the innovation processes of other manufacturing and services sectors with an innovative and creative output. Culture and creativity may be a strategic weapon to exit the present crisis and redefine an economic model of sustainable development.

This book brings together a set of multidisciplinary contributions to investigate the kaleidoscope of European creativity, focussing on CCIs and the innovations connected with them. The two main questions that this volume aims to address are: How can we identify, map and define CCIs in Europe? And how do they contribute to innovation and sustainable growth?

The volume is split into two parts. The first part deals with the definition, measurement and mapping of the geography of European CCIs according to a local economic approach, focussing on Italy, Spain, the UK, Austria, Denmark and France. This section surveys the different industrial typologies and spatial patterns, which underline a significant dissimilarity between the North and the South of Europe, mainly due to the difference between heritage-driven and technology-driven countries. The section concludes with a case study on a Japanese creative city.

The second part collects some interesting cases of innovation generated in creative spaces such as cities of art or creative clusters and networks. This entails the study of innovations among creative and non-creative sectors (e.g. laser technologies in conservation of works of art and design networks in Italy) and across European and non-European countries (e.g. Spaghetti Western movies in the US or visual artists in New Zealand). Finally, an innovation capacity of culture that can regenerate mature sectors (e.g. the French food supply chain and Swiss watch Valley) or combine the creative and green economics paradigms (e.g. the green creative cities in North Europe) is analyzed.

This book will appeal to academics, scholars and practitioners of urban and regional studies, cultural and creative economics and managerial and organization studies.

Part I

Cultural and creative industries in Europe

1
The geography of creative industries in Europe

Comparing France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain

Rafael Boix, Luciana Lazzeretti, Francesco Capone, Lisa De Propris and Daniel Sánchez

Introduction

Creative industries and creative people tend to concentrate spatially. The spatial patterns of distribution of creativity highlight the importance of the place for the economic creative process. In this chapter we analyze the geographical distribution of creative industries drawing upon a sector-based approach to the phenomenon of creativity. Despite the importance of space in the creative process, there is little research on the geography of the creative industries. Studies on how such activities are unevenly distributed geographically are still at an early stage. The methodology is also evolving and is heavily constrained by the best data available in various countries. In particular, there is a lack of inter-country comparative studies, making it difficult to assess the particularities of each model of creativity.

The main novelty of this research is to compare the geography of creative industries across four European countries: France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. In addition, the research introduces two particularities: first, the use local labour markets (LLMs) as territorial units of analysis allows problems of regional heterogeneity across the four countries to be overcome, as well as local creative systems (LCSs) to be more rigorously mapped. Second, creative industries are divided in traditional and non-traditional, in order to better understand the type of creativity embedded in each country and LCS.

Our measurements show that France, Italy and Spain are more specialized in traditional creative industries, whereas Great Britain stands out because of the relative importance of non-traditional creative industries. A second result is that creative industries are much more spatially concentrated than other industries; in particular, they are attracted by the main LCSs in each of the countries. Indeed, the spatial distributions of creative industries show different patterns such as mono-polar, bi-polar or more diffused in the four countries.

Creative industries and local creative systems: a review of the literature in France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain

This section focuses on the contextualization of the research in the literature on creative industries as empirical and quantitative studies on the spatial distribution of creative industries across countries. To do this, the two basic dimensions of our analysis –namely industry and territory – are defined drawing on the current scholarly debate on creative industries across the countries under analysis.

The term ‘creative industry’ is increasingly used in the context of policy making across developed countries (OECD 2007; UNCTAD 2008, 2010). The term originated in Australia with the report Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy (DCA 1994) although it was popularized by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the UK (DCMS 1998) and extended by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2004; 2008), Leadership Group on Quality Eurostat (LEG Eurostat 2000) and KEA European Affairs (2006).

DCMS (2001: 5) defines creative industries as ‘industries which 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’. Alternatively, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development defines creative industries as

cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs; constitute a set of knowledge-based activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights; comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives; are at the cross-road among the artisan, services and industrial sectors; and constitute a new dynamic sector in the world trade.

(UNCTAD 2008: 4)

Both definitions refer to ‘creative industries’ as a set of economic activities that extend well beyond the cultural sector as it also includes media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) reflecting the shift in the technological platform that digitalization has brought.

The second dimension in the definition of the unit of analysis is the territorial one. Studies on the creative industries have often focused at country-level analysis or specific case studies such as in the UK (De Propris et al. 2009), in Australia (DCITA 2002), the US (Brinkhoff 2006; Markusen et al. 2008), East Asia (Yusuf and Nabeshima 2005), or Arabic countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon) (Harabi 2009). On Europe, LEG Eurostat (2000) and KEA European Affairs (2006) have carried out more aggregate studies on creative industries, and recently Power and Nielsén (2010) explicitly analyzed the spatial patterns of geography of creative and cultural industries.

Power and Nielsén (2010) use regional data (at the NUTS (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics) 2 level when available) and a definition of creative industries that includes advertising, architecture, broadcast media, design and fashion design, gaming software and new media, film, the ‘finer’ arts, heritage, music, photography, print media and object d’art. Their findings suggest that the largest concentration of employees in creative industries is found in the regions of Île-de-France (301,000), Inner London (235,000, plus another 80,000 in Outer London), Lombardy (195,000), West Nederland (195,000), Madrid (172,000), Catalonia (153,000), Denmark/Copenhagen (124,000) and Lazio (118,000).

The different administrative borders of European regions, as well as their size and internal diversity, tend to constraint their ability to define a geography of their creative industries and for this we suggest focusing on smaller and better defined units of analysis. On the other hand, Pratt (1997; 2004) is quite critical of the concept of ‘creative cluster’ because, he argues, it ‘fails to capture the broader spatial, temporal and organizational dynamics of production across the creative industries’, and proposes the concept of creative industries production system (Pratt 2004). In the same way, Lazzeretti et al. (2008) propose the similar concept of LCS as a socio-territorial entity characterized by a high concentration of creative industries and by specific features that facilitate the generation and diffusion of creativity. The LCS is an analytical concept that advances our understanding of the creative processes from the point of view of the place and, in this sense, creativity can be understood as a localized and locally embedded process. In the LCS, creative industries benefit from local external economies and the rules, conventions and local institutions that nourish the creation and diffusion of creativity (see Chapter 2 in this volume). Pratt (2004) argues that this notion is a suitable point of departure for the analysis of creative industries and an appropriate tool for the governance of the creative industries.

Forms of LCS have been mapped for the UK (De Propris et al. 2009), Italy and Spain (Lazzeretti, Boix and Capone 2008). For this study, we put together these three countries and add France to form a continuous neighbourhood of countries. These countries are four of the five largest producers of creative industries in the EU. Methodological similarities across these three previous mapping studies enable a comparison that suggests that the spatial distribution of creative activities varies across countries. This endorses the possibility of a more structured comparative analysis.

France

The geography of creative industries in France is still incomplete. Existing studies have mainly focused on culture, the most traditional part of creative industries.

At the national level, the main contributions have come from the French Ministry of Culture (Ministère de la Culture 2005, 2006a). These reports present studies of traditional creative sectors such as publishing, film and video activities, performing arts, architecture, museums, archives, libraries and trade of cultural products. Their key finding was that in France these sectors employ more than 400,000 employees, accounting for about 2 per cent of total employment. Cultural industries are particularly important in services, where they represent 8.5 per cent of total production and 4 per cent of employment. Another report by the French Ministry of Culture (Ministère de la Culture 2006b) analyzes the creation of cultural enterprises across French regions between 1998 and 2004 and found that one third of French new cultural industries (33.7 per cent) was concentrated in the Île-de-France, in particular, specializing in publishing and audiovisual. Other relevant concentrations are found in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Ázur (11.5 per cent), Rhône-Alpes (7.9 per cent) and Languedoc-Roussillon (5 per cent).

On the other hand, Lacour and Puissant (2008) focus on the analysis of creative services in the functional urban areas of France, including: art, banking, insurance, producer services, trade, management, information technology, data processing in industry, research, telecommunications and transport. Their main results show that the urban area of Paris tends to mainly specialize in the information technology and producer service sectors. More generally, large urban areas are found to specialize in research, while the medium-size urban areas specialize in management, telecommunications, trade, banking, insurance and art.

Baumont and Boiteux-Orain (2005) analyze, in particular, cultural employment in the Île-de-France, and finds that it accounts for 2.8 per cent of the total employment. They observe that around 67 per cent of the cultural employment of the whole region is concentrated in the city of Paris. In the same way, Scott (1997, 2000) analyzes the cultural economy of metropolitan Paris, focusing on media, clothing industries, newspaper publishing, advertising, architectural services and recreation, cultural and sporting activities. His findings are that about 100,000 employees in cultural industries are concentrated Paris, but these appear to be quite dispersed across the city.

Great Britain

The debate on creative industries in Great Britain has been led by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport: its mapping documents unearthed a sector that was not only growing in terms of employment, but also performing very well in terms of exports, as well as positively impacting on the innovation capability of other sectors (DCMS 1998, 2001; HM Treasury 2005).

The work of think tanks such as National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the government-funded ‘Creative Economy Programme’ are keeping these themes at the top of the policy agenda and they have since trickled down to the regional and local levels, with initiatives such as ‘Manchester Digital’ or ‘01Zero-One’ in London.

It can be argued that the definition of creative industries in the UK has privileged those that are more technology-intensive rather t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Cultural and creative industries: an introduction
• PART I Cultural and creative industries in Europe
• PART II Innovation, creative space and symbolic value
• Index