Cultural and creative industries: Innovation, performance and spillovers

Abstract

In recent decades, cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have enjoyed attention from academics and policymakers, as they are argued to be innovative and thus a driving force in new economies and keeping firms competitive. The purpose of the article is to explore CCIs and their innovative performances, and to analyse whether intermediate CCIs services’ inputs affect innovative output in other parts of the economy. In their analysis, the authors use quantitative data on innovation output from the Norwegian dataset on innovation from Eurostat’s Community Innovation Survey (CIS). Microdata on innovation output were merged with accounting data derived from Statistics Norway. The main findings are that CCIs’ firms do not generally report higher innovation output rates than firms in other industries, and that there are significant differences in innovation output rates between firms with and without CCIs’ input. However, the analyses do indicate that innovative and profitable firms may be more inclined to take advantage of CCIs’ input than other firms. The authors concluded that the direction of correlation may thus well be the opposite of common beliefs and arguments.