Naming Our “Invisible Work”: Uncovering and Strengthening Hidden Innovation in Creative SMEs Through Design-Thinking-Led R and D

The economic and cultural importance of the creative industries to the United Kingdom is hard to overstate. This study investigates the potential of using a design thinking (DT)-led approach to research and development (R and D) to enable creative enterprises to enhance their innovation capacity and deliver new products and services with commercial potential. The study focuses on the use of such a model with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) within a regional creative industries cluster. It uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of data from ninety-seven feedback reports from funded projects and four semi-structured talk transcripts. The results indicate strong support for the hypothesis that a DT-led approach to innovation support and training offers significant potential to address two key barriers to R and D capacity development in the creative sector, as identified in the literature. The first such barrier is the preponderance of STEM-based thinking in R and D, which offers a poor model for the ways in which creative enterprises approach product and service development. This leads to a second barrier: such STEM-based models do not enable creative enterprises to recognize and strengthen the innovation activities they already carry out as part of their ongoing business operations, leaving this work at risk of being undervalued and underfunded.