Cultural and creative industries (the arts, design and architecture, screen and radio, advertising and marketing, publishing and media, and creative software and digital content) forms a dynamic industrial continuum based on HASS-led, STEM supported knowledge inputs. The creative services component is a high growth, high income sector which meets ubiquitous consumer and company demand with cutting edge digital and platform services while the cultural production component forms a critical part of Australia’s global soft power and national identity. The latest custom satellite account showed that cultural and creative activity in Australia is substantial, contributing $122.3 billion, or 6.2%, to our GDP, not accounting for the many flow-on economic benefits to quality of life, confidence, health, tourism, education, trade and reputation. Census data shows that in 2021, the creative economy provided employment to 714,632 people, or 5.9 per cent of Australia’s workforce.
The UK experience has been that proactive R&D policy for creative services increases business expenditure on R&D (BERD). In the UK, the cultural and creative industries have long been recognised formally as an industrial sector with distinctive R&D needs and potential. The UK’s Creative Clusters R&D programme is a targeted R&D strategy auspiced by the Arts and Humanities Research Council which has in its first four years produced a 4:1 business:government investment outcome.
The amounts of BERD involved are significant.
As a recent report from the UK Council for Science and Technology to the Prime Minister stated: ‘In 2020, creative businesses spent £3.3 billion on R&D, equivalent to 3.2% of the total gross value added (GVA) of the creative industries and a greater proportion than the UK economy average of 2.3%. This R&D has produced spillover benefits across the wider economy in diverse areas such as defence, agriculture, healthcare, and education. The creative industries are also important generators of new ideas and knowledge, with significant growth potential in sub-sectors that combine science and technology with the arts and humanities.’
Two of its key Recommendations are ‘to ensure public investment in R&D in the creative industries reflects the size, economic contribution, and future growth potential of the sector’ and to ‘support a future broadening of the definition of R&D eligible for tax relief to include arts, humanities, and social sciences research’.
While many Australian states have recognised creative industries as crucial sectors ripe for targeted policy intervention and support, at a national level Australia has had a ‘hot and cold’ policy response to the potential of the creative industries. A Creative Industries Cluster Study was conducted by the Australian Government well before the UK initiative, in the early 2000s, which resulted in a high level industry leaders’ report: Unlocking the potential: Strategic Industry Leaders Group report to the Australian Government. The Creative Industries Innovation Centre, a six-year (2009-2014) ‘natural experiment’ in including the creative industries in a group of high-potential growth industries, serviced improvements in the business performance of 1500 small and medium sized enterprises. Its major R&D findings included that creative SMEs were distinctive in their business models, and thus under-served by standard business development and R&D schemes, and critically lacked sound education and training linkages with higher and vocational education. The Centre showed the importance of innovation process, and not just product. This insight is essential in understanding the place of professional services in R&D strategy.
Australia should recognise formally the cultural and creative industries as an industrial sector; develop R&D models which build on its distinctive HASS-led, STEM supported dynamics; and capture its economic, social and cultural value as a critical part of professional and creative services’ central role in twenty first century R&D strategy.
With thanks to Associate Distinguished Emeritus Professor Stuart Cunningham AM FAHA, QUT.
