Linking the creative economy with universities’ entrepreneurship: A spillover approach

Abstract

In recent years the importance of the creative economy has also characterised the international higher-education sector through specialised education, research and entrepreneurship. In this paper I apply and discuss the concept of spillovers as a relevant theoretical framework to understand and foster the value generated by university programs in the creative economy. After introducing the main concepts of spillovers in relation to innovation and growth, I discuss the recent developments in the research on spillovers applied to the arts, culture, and creativity. Through a contextualised model of academic creative economy, the analysis is combined with that on knowledge spillovers in higher education and universities’ third mission, to fill a research gap that still exists in creative economy programs and their potential to generate creative spillovers. The study further integrates some more recent literature on university spillovers, which can provide useful methodological suggestions especially oriented toward internalising and enabling positive creative spillovers, in particular in an urban context.