The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has launched the next round of its Creative Clusters investment and is inviting applications for new partnerships to drive innovation and growth across the UK’s creative Industries. We’ve collated relevant Creative PEC research to help when preparing your bids.
Depending on the geography and creative sub-sector(s) of your proposal, several Creative PEC papers will be of value as you gather evidence for your bid. You can search Creative PEC’s entire archive here, using search terms such as your city, region or creative subsector e.g. film / games design.
Foundational Reports on Creative Clusters
These three reports provide historical analysis and context on mapping creative clusters in the UK. Creative PEC was involved with each of these reports.
- The geography of creativity in the UK (Creative Clusters, Creative People and Creative Networks). Co-authored by Creative PEC Director Hasan Bakhshi this report was a Nesta and Creative England collaboration to understand the geography of creativity in the UK, its evolution and its drivers. It provides a better understanding of the local economic significance of the creative industries and their strengths and weaknesses in one area vis-à-vis other areas to inform the priorities of local policymakers and help design targeted policies to support creative businesses. July 2016
- Creative Nation: How the Creative Industries are powering the UK’s nations and regions. Creative Nation uses official, open and web data to map the creative industries in the UK: their evolution, contribution to local economic development, the strength of their support ecosystems – including research and networking – and their connections with each other. February 2018
- Understanding the growth potential of creative clusters. A Frontier Economics Report published by the DCMS, which develops a framework for measuring the growth potential of the creative industries in different local areas. The framework is based on economic theory, published cluster mapping analyses, previous studies of the development potential of the creative industries. It proposes a five-point framework for benchmarking local growth potential. August 2022
Mapping creative clusters
These resources provide data and analysis at the level of UK regions and creative clusters at different scales.
- Geographies of Creativity – Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre
Provides evidence on creative clustering at three geographical levels: micro clusters, clusters and creative corridors. December 2023
- Mapping and examining the determinants of England’s rural creative microclusters – Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. An exploration of micro-clusters in rural settings. A Creative PEC partnership report with the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE). May 2022
- Creative radar: Mapping the UK’s creative industries – Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. To create a map of the UK’s creative industries, researchers scraped data from the websites of 200,000 creative businesses, allowing them to pinpoint where organisations were based. This helped them to identify ‘clusters’ of creative firms within walking distance of each other. Accompanying the report is an interactive map highlighting existing cluster and microcluster activity. November 2020
- Creative Radar 2021: The impact of COVID-19 on the UK’s creative industries – Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. Building on our Creative Radar 2020 report, this report examines the impact of COVID-19 on the UK’s creative microclusters. July 2021
- Creative Corridors: connecting clusters to unleash potential. This report draws examples from international innovation corridors which demonstrate the connective potential for other sectors. It uses the latest emerging evidence on potential corridor growth and a number if cites pioneering corridor initiatives in the UK, which can be seen in places ranging from Wales and the West of England to the Thames Estuary in the South East of England. October 2024
Creative Cluster Case Studies
- This is a selection of case studies of clusters that share common factors such as the role performed by ‘anchor institutions’ (often universities or large venues, museums or galleries) in local places, the importance of building on local heritage and skills while also innovating and looking to the future of the industry, the centrality of networks that bring together those with different skills, and the need to understand the strengths within a locality that could represent valuable areas for growth and innovation.
Co-location and spillovers from creative industries into other sectors
- All Together Now? – Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. Blog post by Dr. Josh Siepel suggesting place-based public investments should consider linkages between Industrial Strategy sectors. April 2025
- Job Mobility in and Around the Creative Economy. A report by Professor Hasan Bakhshi and Richard Dorsett exploring labour mobility in and outside creative clusters, finding indicative evidence that clusters support thick labour markets and knowledge spillovers. October 2023
- Creative spillovers: do the creative industries benefit firms in the wider economy? Partnership report with Frontier Economics showing knowledge spillovers from the Creative Industries have a beneficial impact on the innovation of firms in the wider economy. July 2023
Inclusive growth in creative clusters
- Beyond growth: promoting inclusive development of creative clusters in the UK. Stresses the need to ensure creative industries expansion benefits more diverse groups and regions and addresses social mobility cold spots, with an emphasis on inclusive growth. The work draws on an in-depth study of Yorkshire’s screen cluster and other case studies from UK cities and regions. July 2024
International Trade and Exports
- Will the Creative Exporters Please Stand Up. Shows creative micro, small and medium sized firms are more likely to be exporters and innovators in all regions and nations of the UK. December 2025
- Foreign Direct Investment in the UK’s Creative Industries. This report confirms the UK’s global position as a world-leading destination for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the creative industries and highlights regional variations by creative sub-sectors. It also suggests that the existence of regional creative clusters may play a role in attracting FDI. November 2024
- UK Trade in a Global Creative Economy – Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. Assesses the international outlook of the UK’s creative industries, with a focus on exports. It includes comparative regional analysis of exporting intensity across UK regions and nations. March 2024
- The Motives of Inbound Foreign Direct Investment in the UK Creative Industries. This report explores the motives behind new, expansion and co-location FDI projects in the UK, including breakdowns by UK region. May 2023
Access to Finance
- Unleashing Creativity: Fixing the Finance Gap in the Creative Industries. Partnership report with Creative UK. Includes regional analysis of financial barriers to creative industries growth. March 2025
- Growth finance for the creative industries. Includes analysis of the regional distribution of growth finance investments over from 2013 to 2023. October 2024
Creative Workforce
- Creative self-employed workforce in England and Wales. This dataset and interactive map provides a detailed breakdown of the self-employed workforce within the creative industries, using the list of creative occupations under the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020, highlighting the numbers and distributions of the self-employed workforce at both local authority and combined authority levels. March 2025
- The Good Work Review. This review of working conditions in the creative industries looks to shift the focus beyond the pace of growth and the volume of opportunities in the Creative Industries: to consider the quality of work in the Creative sector: to aspire for more and better jobs: and to pursue a labour market strategy where Creative workers are viewed as an asset to be nurtured, central to the competitive advantage of the Creative Industries. February 2023
R&D and Innovation
- What can we learn about the innovation performance of the Creative Industries from the UK Innovation Survey? This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of innovation within the Creative Industries, based on data from five waves of the UK Innovation Surveys (UKIS) spanning 2012-14 to 2020-22. March 2025
- Understanding createch R&D. This report aims to propose a practicable definition of ‘createch’ business for researchers and policymakers that is easily implemented and scalable, and to understand the differences in R&D investments, activities and practices between createch and other technology firms. November 2022
- The role of the university in enhancing creative clusters. This paper explores the relationship between higher education institutions and the creative industries by comparing two different areas, the West Midlands Combined Authority and the Cardiff Capital Region. The authors identify a significant skills shortage in both areas which is holding the creative industries, and the wider economy back. They also found that higher education is increasingly relied upon by national policy makers to improve skills in their regions, a role that was previously assigned to industry. September 2022
