The role of innovation and research & development in the creative industries’ growth journey

Professor Christopher Smith is the Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), International Champion for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and UKRI Creative Industries Sector Champion. As an advocate, industry expert and devotee of the creative industries, Christopher’s perspective on the sector is invaluable. We sat down with Christopher to talk about the importance of research & development (R&D) in the sector’s growth journey, the importance of creative clusters, misperceptions between investors and creators, and what is so brilliant about Chaucer.

This interview was conducted in May 2025 following AHRC’s support of The Big Creative UK Summit 2025, which is returning next year.

Christopher Smith

Why are the creative industries important here in the UK?

The UK has always been an industrious and an industrial nation, and it’s always been a creative nation. What’s really exciting right now is that we’re pretty much at the top of the world in bringing together industry and creativity in this extraordinary sector. It’s our new industrial revolution. We are content providers par excellence. We know what to do with that content, how to get it to people. And we don’t do that just in the UK – we do it right across the world. The value of this production doesn’t sit with just a few communities, it really spreads across counties, the country, and the continents. Growing the UK economy is important for everybody, but increasingly, we’re realising that we can grow local economies through creative industries. That’s why the government have so clearly backed the creative industries in the Industrial Strategy and why our mayors have all got creative industries in their devolution plans. So, this is our great moment: industriousness, industry, creativity, all together, we’re at the top of the game.

How do you champion the creative industries at the Arts and Humanities Research Council?

I see my job, as the Executive Chair of AHRC, as helping the whole of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) find its inner creative spirit. At the Council, we’re motivated by the notion that we can take the creative thinking that arts and humanities brings and apply it to clever medical applications, like Hug. Hug is a sensory product used in lots of spaces – care homes, hospitals, homes – to support those who are sick, anxious or distressed, and is particularly impactful for people living with dementia. The innovation process for Hug started from thinking about the human issue, which was patients with dementia and those experiencing loneliness; then next we applied the medical research and practice, and finally, the product was created through support from AHRC and the Welsh Government.

How important is R&D to the growth of the creative industries in the UK?

There are several ways in which you can’t really get the maximum value out of the creative industries without research or development; one of them, is early-stage research. Often, we’re thinking about the very furthest end of something and how we’re going to get there, for instance, like haptics and how it’s helping with future telecommunications. We could think about what is needed to be able to access 6G or 7G and the extreme amount of R&D required. But why do we want this amazing technology? We call this the Use Case Study. Some of the use will be financial gain for corporations, but for you and me, it’s everything from gaming to streaming from the Cloud to infotainment. Critically, it’s not just about creating the technology and plugging it in; the creative industries ask the questions that make the technology better, and it’s in that space where R&D is at its most valuable, I think.

In another vein, there’s also public R&D supporting the ‘risky thinking’ for companies. This is where an R&D team support early-stage risk taking with an innovator that is starting up or scaling – it’s what the AHRC does through our clusters, like CoSTAR, it’s what Innovate UK does. This sort of R&D activity in the public realm has highlighted that our investment, research and development skills are also necessary to support the private sector. The private sector doesn’t run entirely by itself; it relies on the fact that we’re creating skills and capability in the public realm which can be applied to the private sector. This is a factor which gets regularly challenged, but it is very true of the creative industries. When I talk to people at Amazon Web Services or Google Play or similar companies, they want us, the public realm, to be doing the risky research so that they can learn from that. So there is a positive interplay there between the two sectors – early-stage risk support and driving private success – which can translate and grow the wider economy.

Can you share one thing you think the UK Government should be doing to help grow the creative industries?

I’m going to give two, if I may. One is, in any industrial strategy, we need the government to be financially supporting – and also intellectually supporting in Policy – a coherent, refined offer for the creative industries; from the microbusinesses and small medium enterprises through to the freelancers and the R&D sector, which allows companies to grow, get access to finance, access to existing R&D facilities, to scale, stay in the business, and retain their intellectual property (IP). I think it’s the coherence of this offer that is my biggest ask of the government, because once we’ve got that, it becomes business as usual. All the other industrial sectors identified by the UK Government – automotive, aeronautics, energy, defense, and so on – there’s never a conversation about “should we invest in this sector this year?” or “maybe we’ll cut funding there for a couple of years”. The government always invests in those sectors, no questions asked. We made a great step forward in this with the Comprehensive Spending Review and the associated Creative Industries Sector Plan, but that consistency needs to apply to our creative industries too.

The second is something government can do in September this year when the World Design Congress comes to the UK. It’s hosted by the Design Council, which is 80 years old this year, and is one of our greatest institutions; it picked the UK up after the war, when the UK was thinking about how it might grow out of that terrible conflict. And the answer was design, in everything from airplanes to fashion to furniture to architecture. It’s all around us, and the design economy is enormous. It’s supposed that the design economy contributes £97.4 billion GVA to the UK economy. We’ve got a recent report by Design Council which points out that in 2020, the design workforce comprised 1.97 million people, accounting for one in every 20 UK workers. So, our design industry is huge. The two top design universities in the world are in the UK too, the University of Arts London (UAL) and the Royal College of Art (RCA). On the year the World Design Congress’ returns to Britain (for the first time in 50 years), I want there to be government ministers there shouting about the fact that we are the best at design in the world.

Earlier this year you spoke on a panel at the Creative UK Investment For Growth Summit. Why did you want to be involved in that event?

In the first instance, it’s always great to be together with creators and those representing creativity to hear their ideas, and attending Creative UK’s Summit was particularly appropriate for me this year while being on the Industrial Strategy Task Force. But I was particularly interested in the fact that we were talking about growth at the event. I think it’s important we grow our economy sustainably and appropriately and I believe the creative industries have got something to say about both sides of that equation. We’ve got many areas of the creative industries growing faster than other sectors, even post-COVID. The difference is, we know that others are investing in those sectors more than the creative sector, which is where the growth in those sectors is increasing. We’ve got to keep talking about the importance of creative industries to everybody, nationally and globally, and keep at it.

I think there’s also something in that the creative industries both believe in and inculcate a respect for the environment in which they work. There’s the commitment of the Creative Industries Council to environmental sustainability, which is really important; with CoSTAR, we’re trying to manage the environmental cost of film, which is also significant. Even in design, the Design Council’s mission is ‘Design for Planet’. It’s thought that 80% of waste is designed in at the outset of a product, so if we can improve design at the outset, we can reduce the waste produced at the end point of a product.

Recently, I was at De Montfort University, and they were doing some amazing things with natural plant fibres. Did you know that if you take wool and you put it with bast, which is a natural fibre, it is naturally flame-retardant? I think there’s such a lot we do in this country, in the creative industries, that we can shout about, and I wanted to do that at the conference. It’s an occasion for us to really think about the opportunities that exist, but also an occasion to hear the concerns of people working across the sector, and the Investment for Growth Summit was a great space to think about those things.

Is there a misperception of the creative industries that is commonly held by investors?

I think the easy answer to this would be to assume that investors think the creative industries are not something that will ever make them any money, and that it’s a flaky sector and too high risk. But I wonder whether that’s entirely right. I think there’s another barrier for investors, which is that it’s very difficult for them to get their arms around it because the creative industries are so big – they’re very diverse, they’re built around micro to small enterprises. The sector doesn’t have the same kind of investable product where investors can back a big multinational or a supermarket chain; there’s not a straightforward model for our sector. So, I think it’s quite difficult for a venture capitalist to spot the micro, small, medium enterprise that’s operating out of, say, a low-cost studio in Sheffield, or even somebody’s bedroom in Greenock. How would investors find them?

I think we must consider whether we’ve created enough of a structure which helps micro and small medium enterprises raise their visibility, get investor ready, then get access to finance and be part of investable portfolios. This has been a key concern of the Creative Industries Sector Plan too. I understand it that investors often want a portfolio so they can balance risk. Well one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about creative clusters is that where one exists, it can gather 100 SMEs in a region so that you’ve got a totally different, investable proposition. You’ve not got one SME, you’ve got dozens. And we can wrap in business support that Innovate UK and others are so good at doing, that really helps somebody understand their business journey and gain the knowledge that comes with that.

Can you elaborate a bit on the creative clusters that AHRC helped deliver?

We ran a programme of nine clusters, which ended about a year ago, and they were delivered in support of the UK’s previous Industrial Strategy. Each cluster programme did so well that they’re still in operation and have kept going in one way or another: StoryFutures has now evolved into the national lab of CoSTAR which Studio Ulster came out of, specialising in virtual production, and InGAME has continued through CoSTAR too; XR Stories has gone on to develop the XR Network+; Leeds and UAL did fashion, and they’re still going; then Bristol and Bath and Cardiff clusters received Strength in Places funding, so they accelerated even earlier.

We’ve just launched another couple of clusters in the West Midlands and Liverpool too, one focusing on music (Liverpool) and one on createch (West Midlands). AHRC is incredibly excited about both. We’ve never done a cluster for music, and we realised that most of the population listens to some form of music and gets enjoyment out of it. So, the Liverpool cluster, MusicFutures, is investing in the future of music, providing funding and training for musicians, educators and small businesses; and ultimately bedding in those opportunities for connections and collaboration with other regions, with other creative sectors. And that’s already started to happen – I was at the University of the West of England (UWE) where I met someone from Drake Music who works with disabled musicians. We put them in touch with the team in Liverpool and, hopefully, Drake Music will be able to do something with MusicFutures to support all disabled musicians in the UK.

What is one thing you’ve watched, read, or listened to recently that has left a lasting impression on you?

It’s a bit niche, but I’ve just finished reading a book by Marion Turner who is a Chaucer expert. Her book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography explores what happens in Chaucer’s original, why Chaucer wrote The Wife of Bath the way he did, and what has happened to the telling of the story over time. What struck me was that this story has been going for 600 years and we can now trace 600 years of rethinking and reworking of this original content through film adaptations, theatre, novels. There’s likely someone right now, somewhere, thinking about The Wife of Bath as a way that they understand themselves, the role of women and the difficulties they face, and translating it into another form. That is why creativity actually matters; because of that content, we can think, debate, talk about, and imagine what it was like to be a woman in the 14th century and how that relates to being a woman now. That’s what the creative industries are about – taking content that will last and last and last, that we can reimagine, and that we can have national conversations about.