Sector insight at scale: the new Creative Business Panel

As announced by our partner the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre, the CoSTAR Foresight Lab is co-leading the new Creative Business Panel (CBP), a groundbreaking initiative that will track the behaviours, performance and experiences of businesses across all creative sub-sectors, business sizes and UK locations.

This is an exciting milestone for CoSTAR, with the Creative Business Panel forming one of the Foresight Lab’s key projects.

From the Foresight Lab’s perspective, our focus will be on businesses in the sub-sectors across CoSTAR’s remit (Games, Film, TV, Performance and Digital Entertainment). As one of the key Foresight Lab activities, here we explain more about how the Creative Business Panel will work.

Collaboration between projects

The CoSTAR Foresight Lab is one of five labs funded as part of CoSTAR, a £75.6 million national R&D network of laboratories supporting new innovations and experiences that will enrich the UK’s creative industries, economy, and culture. The Foresight Lab’s role in the CoSTAR network is to capture and disseminate a body of industry knowledge, trends and needs – present and future.

Meanwhile, the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre (PEC) supports growth of the UK’s creative industries in their entirety through providing independent and authoritative evidence and policy advice. Both projects are funded by the UKRI via the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The vision for co-commissioning the Creative Business Panel was developed as part of the Foresight Lab’s workplan, bringing together two flagship research units to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Key stakeholders from the Foresight Lab and the PEC worked tirelessly to develop the initial outline and scope for the survey, which led to the appointment of Verian as our delivery partner for the CBP. All three teams then collaborated to refine the full set of questions for the survey, balancing the need for breadth and depth with the need to keep respondents engaged.

Capturing businesses’ priorities  

The Creative Business Panel will be undertaken in five waves, crucially providing a longitudinal dataset tracking the behaviours, performance and experiences of businesses across all creative sub-sectors, business sizes and UK locations. Businesses will be contacted directly by Verian to take part on an annual basis.

The data we capture will tell us about the size and shape of creative businesses throughout the UK, and generate rich insights about businesses’ strategic priorities, barriers to success, and skills needs. Crucially for CoSTAR, the survey will ask businesses about their R&D plans, activities and investment as well as their use of digital media production technologies.  

We’ll also gather information about sustainability and equality, diversity & inclusion, both of which are strategic priority areas for CoSTAR. 

Communications, briefings, publications

Over the lifetime of the CoSTAR Foresight Lab, we will generate a breadth of insightful outputs using data from the Creative Business Panel. As one of our largest datasets, the qualitative and quantitative analysis we conduct will help us map the present and future of creative technology on an unprecedented scale. It will feed into the work across the Foresight Lab, from our foresight activity mapping possible long-term futures to our data analysis of the immediate trends in the creative sector to our policy work engaging legislators and lobbyists. The Foresight Lab’s data dashboard will enable users to immerse themselves in data visualisations, while we’ll also publish outputs jointly with our partners Verian and the PEC.

Watch this space as this exciting work unfolds. To find out more about the Foresight Lab visit our webpage, or get in touch at costarforesightlab@gold.ac.uk.