Research at UCA: The Business School for the Creative Industries

Blue Circular Economy is a three-year international project led by Professor Martin Charter, in which a team of researchers looked at the environmental impacts of waste fishing ropes and nets, and facilitated challenges for designers and businesses to create new products from these waste materials.

The project aims to support the development of an industry specialising in reducing fishing net waste in regions across Europe’s Northern Edge. It is co-funded by the EU Interreg Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme (NPA).

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A foresight report on Creative Industries in 2030 with a particular focus on Sustainability & Industry 4.0. Research funded by Research England Strategic Priorities Fund.

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This study provides a prompt understanding of actual travel behaviours during and after a real time pandemic building on an earlier published study of intended behaviours. Quantitative online survey data gathered during China's first national multi-day holiday - Golden Week (October 2020) - since the lifting of the country's stringent travel restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed for actual post-pandemic travel behaviours to be investigated. The survey carried out for this purpose included decisions in favour or against travel, motivations, means of travel, as well as changes in terms of travel duration, travel distance and spending. A taxonomy is developed for actual tourist behaviours within a post-pandemic domestic tourism context to understand factors influencing these behaviours, including perceived risk, anxiety, trust and financial constraints.

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Researching Art Markets brings together a scholars from several, various disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, this collection offers a unique multi-disciplinary contribution that disentangles some of the key aspects and trends in art market practices from the past to nowadays, namely art collectors, the artist as an entrepreneur and career paths, and the formation and development of new markets.

In understanding the global art market as an ecosystem, the book also examines how research and perceptions have evolved over time. Within the frameworks of contemporary social, economic and political contexts, issues such as business practices, the roles of market participants and the importance of networks are analysed by scholars of different disciplines. With insights from across the humanities and social sciences, the book explores how different methods can coexist to create an interdisciplinary international community of knowledge and research on art markets. Moreover, by providing historical as well as contemporary examples, this book explores the continuum and diversity of the art market.

Overall, this book provides a valuable tool for understanding art markets within their wider context. The volume is of interest to scholars researching into the cultural and creative industries from a wider perspective.

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In recent years the importance of the creative economy has also characterised the international higher-education sector through specialised education, research and entrepreneurship. In this paper I apply and discuss the concept of spillovers as a relevant theoretical framework to understand and foster the value generated by university programs in the creative economy. After introducing the main concepts of spillovers in relation to innovation and growth, I discuss the recent developments in the research on spillovers applied to the arts, culture, and creativity. Through a contextualised model of academic creative economy, the analysis is combined with that on knowledge spillovers in higher education and universities’ third mission, to fill a research gap that still exists in creative economy programs and their potential to generate creative spillovers. The study further integrates some more recent literature on university spillovers, which can provide useful methodological suggestions especially oriented toward internalising and enabling positive creative spillovers, in particular in an urban context.

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Magazine publishing is an industry that has been transformed in the last two decades. Having to innovate in the face of digital media, this chapter examines innovation theory and the ‘drivers’ of innovation for the UK magazine business. Providing an assessment of these drivers through a PEST analysis framework (analyses of political, economic, sociological and technological history), the chapter reveals them as facets of a ‘networked society’, the ‘digital economy’ and its related neoliberal governmental policy. Providing a case example, within this context, of innovation at Decanter magazine, the chapter suggests strategies for legacy print and digital magazine publishers – ones that theorists Christensen (1997) and Christensen et al. (2015) might recognise as routes to both ‘sustaining’ and ‘disruptive’ innovation.

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The “Give (Back) Credit to the Heritage Communities” project seeks to reposition the value of cultural craft within the fashion industry, and proposes a new collaborative and considered approach to the creative process when working with heritage communities. The importance of restoring control and recognition to makers of heritage products is imperative to preserve this endangered knowledge and intangible heritage and promote an alternative to the destructive transactional relationships in the present fashion supply chain. Total project grant €149,310.00.

The University for the Creative Arts is a partner of the “Give (Back) Credit to the Heritage Communities” project, which is co-financed by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

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