According to the recent report by the Creative and Cultural Skills, creative industries have become an increasingly important driver of growth for the UK economy. This is closely consistent with the conclusion of NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts) that the UK creative industries will take centre-stage as a major high growth contributor to the UK economy over the next ten years. The report produced by the Creative and Cultural Skills suggests that during the five year period from 2007 to 2011, the UK creative industries which consist of films, music, fashion, television, and video games production have experienced an annual growth rate of about 4.5% – almost twice higher than that of the rest of the country’s economy. At the time being, there are about 150,000 creative businesses in the sector. In total, they contribute about £80 billion to UK value added. In addition, these industries together have about 1.5 million employees on their payrolls – a number almost equal to that of the UK financial sector.
These above figures san really speak a lot by themselves. However, they are still not the end of the story. As suggested by Lazzeretti, the future for the UK creative industries in the next decades will be even more optimistic since a lot of growth opportunities for these are likely to arise from constant innovations and the continuous development of digital technologies. These will certainly enhance creative businesses to improve their business models and hence their contribution to the growth of the UK economy. The massive success of iTunes over the last 3 years can provide an excellent example to illustrate why the perspective for these industries will be so optimistic. Hence, in the next ten year, UK creative industries are expected to account for 7% of the UK economy, a contribution comparable to that of the country’s financial sector.
The increasing importance of the UK creative industries to the country’s economy has an important implication about the need to figure out approaches to enhance the sustainable development of these industries so that they can contribute better to the UK economy. However, until now the current literature has remained almost silent on this critical issue. Put it differently, no study has been directed toward the investigation of how the growth of these industries in the UK can be facilitated.
The study will be very useful for the academic camp, policy makers, and creative businesses in the country. In particular, its major findings will form significant contributions to the current literature since no study so far has touched this important issue in the UK context. At the same time, UK policy makers will be provided with an insight into how critical the growth of these creative industries is to the UK economy and how it can be promoted through the employment of appropriate mechanisms and policies. In other words, the study is going to give them feasible recommendations on how to enable their creative industries to make more significant contributions to the economy. Finally, from the creative businesses’ point of view, this kind of study is essential in the sense that it will enable them to see where they are now and where they may travel to, given the country’s policies on their development.
So because of above all, the study of this aspect should be paid much more attention as well as carried on as quickly as possible.
Yuxin Yang 