Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
The creative industries play an important role in the UK – we have the largest creative sector in the EU and our creative industries accounted for 7.3 per cent of total UK Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2005.
And recent research by NESTA finds that 34% of the creative workforce is employed in non-creative sectors, making creative activities as embedded in the economy as financial services.
So far so good. But the government is keen to ensure that the creative industries– which, in addition to design, cover advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, and television and radio – reach their full potential.
Top facts about the creative industries
Creative businesses are more likely to collaborate and form partnerships than other sectors
Only 35% of creative SMEs use formal business planning techniques
A third of creative businesses with an annual turnover of more than £1 million have no explicit financial goals.
That means a combination of new, joined-up government policies and input from the industries themselves is needed to ensure our creative sector continues to grow and prosper.
We’ve been consulting with designers and working with the government and other agencies to make sure the issues facing people who work in the creative sector have been heard. Issues like competition, intellectual property and the exploitation of new technology, to name but a few.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform have set out 26 commitments in their Creative Economy Strategy document, Creative Britain: new talents for the new economy. These include commitments that will help to improve the skills of people working in the creative industries, as well as actions that will improve the business support given to small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector, including business skills and access to finance.
How will this affect the design industry?
The commitments and actions in the new strategy document are intended to help all creative industries, but there are elements of the plan which are particularly relevant for designers.
These include
- Supporting the work on improving professional standards being driven by the Design Council and Creative and Cultural Skills
- Apprenticeships for up to 5,000 people a year across the creative industries by 2013
- A plan to improve access to finance for creative businesses and enforce Intellectual Property rights
Is there any money behind these promises?
For some of the commitments, certainly.
- The Technology Strategy Board is providing £10 million for a package of measures specifically designed to engage small creative firms in new and collaborative research & development.
- It will also launch a Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) for the creative industries to help industry to access the knowledge and information that will improve innovation.
- NESTA will launch a £3 million Creative Innovators Growth Programme to improve small and medium-sized creative enterprises’ capacity to innovate.
The Design Blueprint outlining the next stages of our work on design skills will be launched in mid-March.
The results of a competitive process to identify the consortium to set up and manage the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) for the creative industries will be announced in early 2008.
