Evaluating Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion activities within Creative Industries Clusters: A report from Creative Informatics

In 2018 UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) created the Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP), which has funded nine large-scale Creative Research and Development Partnerships (CRDPs) across the UK, including Creative Informatics. Creative Informatics (2018–2024) focuses on supporting the Creative Industries in Edinburgh and the South-East Scotland Region to use data to innovate in the production of goods and services. With a network of over 6000 people, and leading to 352 new and safeguarded jobs, Creative Informatics has had a huge impact on the creative industries in its region. But has this been done in a way that advances Equality, Diversity and Inclusion?

This report evaluates the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (ED&I) activities (based on data published up to July 2023) of Creative Informatics (CI) in the context of other funding, policy and research organisations also operating in the space of the Creative Industries. These organisations are Clwstwr, Bristol + Bath Creative Research + Development, and XR Stories and the associated Research England-funded project, SIGN, which are three other regional beneficiaries of the Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP), and the Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre, which is also part of the CICP. We also offer an overview of ED&I activities by Creative Scotland as a comparable Scottish funder of the Creative Industries.

Each of these organisations publishes its own material about ED&I aims, priorities, actions, accountability and reporting, and in this report we introduce the organisations and their self-stated objectives and targets. We then discuss their data collection activities as part of their monitoring practices as well as their reasons for collecting specific data, their comparisons of these data against benchmarks, and how they incorporate intersectionality. Next we look at the collaborators and beneficiaries of projects funded by these organisations and finally we address three recurring issues raised by many of the organisations: how to achieve continued improvement, change at senior levels, and socio-economic inequalities. All of this is placed in the context of wider ED&I activities within the Creative Industries. After introducing this overview of each organisation's activities, our discussion section draws out some common themes and, finally, we offer some recommendations for how to expand upon the evidence and knowledge already circulating in the Creative Industries.