Creativity and design

Creativity and design are important features of a well-developed knowledge economy spurring innovation and having a favourable impact on people’s well-being and business performance. The importance of creativity for innovation is reflected by the fact that 2009 will be the European Year of Creativity and Innovation: “The aim is to exploit and promote creative and innovative approaches and initiatives in different domains of human activity and at all levels. While education and culture will be at the centre of the Year, it feeds into many other policy areas, such as enterprise, information society, employment or regional policy”.

In preparation of a Commission Staff Working Document to be published in 2009, the European Innovation Scoreboard project was asked to prepare a statistical document aimed at measuring Member States’ performance in design and creativity based on currently available quantitative indicators, to classify these indicators into meaningful blocks capturing relevant but distinct aspects of design and creativity, to analyse the links between design and creativity and innovation performance, and to suggest improvements for measuring creativity and design.

Following the EIS, this report adopts a ‘scoreboard approach’ using a large set of indicators to capture the different dimensions. It should be stressed that there is a general lack of quantitative indicators which directly measure creativity and design. Creativity is defined as the generation of new ideas, but the number of ideas is an unobserved statistical phenomenon. For design activities there is more statistical evidence, but the number of indicators directly measuring design activities is limited. We therefore have to rely on so-called proxy indicators, which only indirectly measure creativity and design, thereby creating possible errors in the scoreboard approach where countries’ performance could be under- or overvalued based on the respective bias in these proxy indicators towards measuring ‘true’ performance. The quality of the educational system, the desire of people to express themselves (artistically) and the openness of a society towards different countries and cultures determine the Creative climate. A more favourable Creative climate will result in more ideas, more creativity, and more creativity is assumed to increase R&D and design activities, where R&D and design not only further develop these ideas but also shape them into commercially attractive new products and processes, thus increasing innovation.

The statistical results in this paper confirm that a favourable Creative climate has a positive effect on a country’s creativity, even after controlling for differences in income levels, thus taking into account that wealthier countries are in a position to spend relatively more resources on their education system. Countries where people are eager to be involved in artistic and cultural activities also appear to be more creative. However, openness to other countries and cultures, e.g. reflected by larger shares of foreign students and employees, does not appear to have a positive impact on creativity.
Higher levels of creativity result in increased levels of R&D and design activities. Apparently more ideas create a larger and more diversified pool of potential research projects, tempting firms to increase their R&D and design activities. The statistical results also show strong evidence for a positive link between increased R&D and design activities and overall innovation performance, although innovation is also dependent on a range of other framework conditions.