Hasan is the Director of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. He leads the Centre, a Nesta-led, AHRCfunded research consortium of ten universities, charged with improving the evidence base for policies to support the UK’s creative industries. Prior to Nesta, Hasan worked as Executive Director at Lehman Brothers, as Deputy Chief Economist at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as an economist at the Bank of England. From the first days of Creative Cardiff, he has been inspiring our team with his knowledge of data and how to source and analyse it.
He writes:
On 8 December 2016 I gave a keynote speech at the Cardiff: Creative Capital symposium at Cardiff University. The subject of my speech was how classification and measurement help legitimise the creative economy as a driver of economic development, or in other words help put creativity on the map.
In the time since, Creative Cardiff has certainly helped put creativity on the map. Through convening networks, hosting events, promoting jobs and other business opportunities as well as collating data and conducting research, it has quickly become a resource for all creative talent working across the South Wales economy.
It has also played a key role in developing Clwstwr, an R&D hub for the creative media industries, funded through the UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, which brings together Cardiff University, University of South Wales and Cardiff Metropolitan University.
In short, Creative Cardiff has rapidly become part of the ecosystem that is South Wales’ Creative Economy. One that, for example, explains why Cardiff is identified as a Creative Challenger cluster in Nesta’s Creative Nation mapping: clusters which have experienced rapid growth in recent years and are on track to become central nodes within the UK’s creative geography.
But the usual ways of measuring the contribution of clusters – of the sort governments typically use to evaluate their investments – use official statistics that focus on business units and households. Surveys and administrative data sources rarely, if ever, measure the relationships between agents that underpin ecosystems. Alternative indicators looking at the nature of collaborations between Cardiff-based universities and creative businesses, for example, show that the vast majority of such collaborations are with businesses based throughout the UK, not just those in Cardiff. And they show that these research collaborations are with a much more diverse set of sub-sectors than is the case with universities in other Creative Challenger clusters like Edinburgh, Bristol or Sheffield.
It’s time that we evaluated the performance of the creative cluster in terms of the health of the relationships that underpin it, not just by the number and growth of businesses, important though these are.
