After a video meeting with Dr Josh Siepel from Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre, it was clear that more research needs to be done regarding rural creative clusters, but the findings and research approach so far is heading in the right direction.
The PEC report published today identifies 709 of these distinct creative microclusters. These were identified using a big data exercise where we took scraped web data from 200,000 websites of creative industries organisations and ran an algorithm to identify where there were clusters of at least fifty creative industries organisations in an area. We see that these microclusters are spread widely across the UK. One-third are outside of the 47 major creative clusters that have widely been identified in the past. Building on this data exercise, we surveyed nearly 1000 companies in early 2020, to learn about how they operate and the challenges they face.