Geography of the creative industries. A novel approach to understanding microclusters.

Major urban centres are the sorts of places we would expect to find creative businesses clustered together. Indeed, Nesta’s 2016 report The Geography of Creativity in the UK identified 47 established clusters based in cities like London, Oxford, Bristol, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Sheffield. However, a comprehensive study by researchers at the Policy & Evidence Centre (PEC) from the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex has broadened the understanding of the creative industries across the whole of the UK using rich business data from glass.ai.

We used web-scale language understanding technology to read social media, news and the websites of over two million companies across the UK, applying a comprehensive topic ontology to classify companies at both a high- and very granular level of understanding of the activities they each perform. Using this deep multi-dimensional view of businesses within the economy allows different — hard to categorize — business segments to be investigated.

In particular, creative businesses are not adequately represented by standard industry categorisations, but with glass.ai the PEC researchers were able to identify more than 200,000 creative businesses to include in their study. And further, with geographic data collected for each organisation, the study identified over 700 microclusters of creative activities — many of which exist outside the established regional creative clusters.

You can learn more about the study here or investigate the different UK creative clusters with this interactive map.