Universities as innovation agents for the creative industries – An exploratory quantitative study from Wales
Marlen K. Miklós F.M.
December 2025Elsevier Ltd
City, Culture and Society
2025#43
Universities are increasingly recognized as key actors in regional innovation ecosystems, yet their role as “innovation agents” for the creative industries remains underexplored. While previous scholarship highlights universities’ contributions through research, skills provision, and technology transfer, little empirical evidence exists on how they amplify the innovation capacity of creative firms. This article addresses this gap through an exploratory quantitative study of 385 firms in Wales, drawing on data from the Clwstwr programme (2019–2021), a university-led initiative. We develop an analytical framework focusing on four major innovation drivers - skills and knowledge, networking, training, and funding - and examine whether university engagement enhances their effect on firm innovativeness. Employing econometric modelling, we find that firms engaged with the university exhibit significantly stronger relationships between each driver and overall innovativeness than firms outside the university-programme. Notably, university engagement magnifies the marginal effects of networking, training, and funding on innovativeness, with funding showing particularly large gains. These results provide novel evidence that universities can act as effective innovation agents, going beyond traditional roles of knowledge creation to actively shape firm-level innovation processes in the creative industries. The findings have implications for firms, which can leverage university partnerships to strengthen innovation outcomes; for universities, which can expand their role in local creative economies; and for policymakers, who can design targeted support mechanisms to embed universities within regional innovation strategies. By situating the Welsh case within broader debates on creative clusters and university–industry collaboration, this study contributes to understanding how universities drive innovation in under-researched sectors such as the creative industries.
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JOMEC—School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, 2 Central Square, Cardiff, CF10 1FS, United Kingdom
Imec-VUB-SMIT (Studies on Media, Innovation and Technology), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, Brussels, 1050, Belgium
Satbayev University - E. Turkebayev Institute for Project Management, Department of Management and Mathematical Economics, Satpaev St 22, Almaty, 050000, Kazakhstan
JOMEC—School of Journalism
Imec-VUB-SMIT (Studies on Media
Satbayev University - E. Turkebayev Institute for Project Management
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