Creative Nation, a new study using structured web data from glass.ai

Nesta, a global innovation foundation, has launched a new report that combines official and open web data to map the creative industries in the UK. The study was produced in collaboration with the Creative Industries Council.

The report highlights that creative industries are driving economic growth across the UK, on track to create one million new creative industries jobs between 2013 and 2030.

We helped Nesta map the scale of the creative industries across the UK. It’s very hard to measure the state of new sectors or emerging fields. Official industry codes that are used to measure the economy fail to capture new sectors, so official data is not very useful for measuring them. This results in a lack of evidence that hinders policy-making and the market research efforts of companies.

Nesta used Glass because our intelligent crawler has digitally mapped (for the first time) the UK economy, tracking any topic of interest across hundreds of millions of web pages, watching over a million organisations. This new resource that we are building allowed Nesta to identify businesses engaged in ‘creative’ activities and businesses in the UK ‘creative economy’.

Juan Mateos-Garcia, Director of Innovation Mapping at Nesta, said: “With Glass, finding relevant companies for our research took no time at all. We could not have achieved this without their ability to read the web at scale”.