Articoli taggati con ‘r&d’
The emerging industries in our complex scenario
In 2019, the European Panorama for Cluster published the report “Emerging Industries: Driving strength in 10 cross-sectoral industries”. Even though the social and economic conjuncture changed rapidly for the Covid-19 pandemic, this report highlights some structural features of our economic scenario that could be useful to discuss. As stated by the title, the report focuses on emerging industries and, more in detail, it aims at expressing the relevance that 10 “new industries” play for our entire economic system. The reason why these clusters are so interesting for the European Observatory for Clusters and Industrial Change is that the companies active in these sectors show, among others, two main characteristics: first, a business model that could generate significative results in terms of gross added value and, second, they’re working on products and services that could lead to a cross-sectoral innovation among different industries. The clusters included within the macro-area of the “emerging industries” are 10, and among them, there are at least three clusters that interest us closely: the digital, the experiential, and the creative industries.
R&D in creative industries: some lessons from the book publishing sector
Introduction Creative industries (CIs) deserve an ever increasing interest in recent years. Opportunities of economic wealth, growth and jobs creation at local level are identified as key factors (Henry, de Bruin, 2011; Piergiovanni et al., 2012) and recent research has been developed specifically on the strategic and economic dimensions of CIs and their business models (Throsby 2001; Howkins 2001; Benghozi, Paris 2007; Lyubareva et al. 2013). Several papers highlight the innovative dimension of CIs. Yet the papers dealing with such issue are all thinking about innovation as a means to develop new creative contents. One very important issue is surprisingly neglected: this is the characteristic and the management of R&D in CIs, especially in the cultural sector. Even the few studies that aim at investigating the potential of R&D to support the CIs do not provide any analysis of the processes and/or technologies adopted. The general absence of investigations on R&D activities in the CIs is due to a biased vision of the real relevance of these assets for creative companies. In other words, the main reason for poor investments in R&D is usually linked to the specific size, skills and capitalization of creative companies. Actually, disruptive technological innovations come from outside and creative firms are not really able to control their evolution. Creative firms conceive the new product development as the development of innovative content and never as technological R&D activities. Consequently, the main disruptive innovations in the CIs have always taken place outside these industries: this was the case for sound movie, for instance, invented by General Electric in the early XXth, for the innovative devices in music (K7, Walkman or CD), created in the 70s and 80s by Philips or Sony, and more recently, for the MP3 and Appstore in music. Within this context, our research perspective aims at understanding where R&D actually takes place in CIs, how the articulation is made with content and development projects, which economic actors are taking charge of it, where they are located in the value chain, how they are articulated with content producers.
