Trends on the radar: cultural and creative industries
The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) operate in a dynamic environment. Developments in the areas of technology, ecology, economy, society and politics create an ever-changing value creation context and have a latent or concrete influence on cultural and creative entrepreneurial practice. It is therefore important to identify and classify relevant changes at an early stage and thus open up scope for shaping one's own (entrepreneurial) actions. Against this background, a comprehensive and weighted collection of trends has been compiled for the first time with the involvement of Bavarian cultural and creative professionals, which is intended to provide an overview and function as a useful source of orientation when dealing with trends.
Das Feld der Trendforschung ist in Deutschland ein vergleichsweise junges und da, wo es sich boulevardesk abseits der seriösen Wissenschaft etabliert, nicht frei von Kritik.1 Triviale bis falsche Befunde nähren Zweifel an ihrer Tragfähigkeit. Der Trendbegriff selbst wird dabei häufig unscharf verwendet.
Trends beschreiben zeitliche wahrnehmbare Muster in der Entwicklung eines bestimmten Beobachtungsgegenstands, und zwar hinsichtlich ausgewählter Merkmale.2 Sie beziehen sich auf „reale Phänomene […], existier[en als solche aber nicht] in der Welt“.3 Sie sind also das Ergebnis analytischer Verdichtung. Ihr zeitlicher Bezugspunkt liegt dabei nicht notwendigerweise in der Zukunft („projektive Trends“), sondern kann ebenso in der Vergangenheit oder Gegenwart gesetzt werden.
The first trend radar for the Bavarian cultural and creative industries has been compiled with this critical awareness in mind. This survey is explicitly not trend research, neither in the scientific nor popular scientific sense, but rather an initiative trend monitoring.4
The aim was to scan the sector's environment on a large scale, in line with the logic of a radar, to identify and locate relevant developments. Due to the chosen search field and aspects of positionality, this study only depicts individual sections of reality and makes no claim to completeness. The first trend radar was implemented in several steps. First, a search field was created using the so-called STEEP categorization. The STEEP categories include the areas of socioculture, technology, economy, ecology and politics/law. Within this search field, the content of the selected categories was then enriched in a heuristic process. This involved a comprehensive, AI-supported review of primary sources (studies, position papers, (online) newspaper articles, etc.), from which developments could be derived that were provisionally recognizable as particularly comprehensive trends and sub-trends included in them. This was followed by manual source checks and plausibility checks as well as further condensing, processing and consolidating the trends. As a result, the collection comprised 36 topics that had to be evaluated by the stakeholders in terms of their significance for the industry.
To this end, they were operationalized and translated into a corresponding survey tool that comprised four evaluation criteria: Influence: How much influence does the trend have on the cultural and creative industries? Speed of penetration: How quickly will the trend have established itself in the CCI? Degree of transformation: To what extent will the trend change the CCI? Potential: How high is the economic potential of this trend for the CCI?
The actual data collection then took place over a period of six weeks, from mid-October to the end of November 2023, and generated 120 responses from a total of 260 website visits. The results of the survey were then processed in an interactive trend radar, the "Digital Innovation Platform (DIP)" of Bayern Innovativ GmbH (see Fig. 28), and are summarized below. The DIP superimposes the evaluation categories and
criteria, as presented above, and thus condenses the trend evaluation information into an overall picture.
The different levels of the radar provide information about the influence of the respective trends, which decreases from the inside of the circle to the outside. The speed at which the trends become established is illustrated by the coloring in the radar (pink 3 - 5 years, white 6 - 10 years), while the market potential is illustrated by the degree to which the corresponding circles are filled. The degree of transformation, in turn, can be seen from the size of the spheres.
Evaluation of the results
First of all, it is striking that there are no maximum values in any of the evaluation categories. The influence of the trends ranges from high to moderate, the penetration speed between 3 - 5 and 6 - 10 years, the market potential between high and moderate and the degree of transformation also ranges between fundamental and moderate changes. It can be assumed that, due to the scope of the survey, a response tendency has developed that tends towards the middle ("satisficing") and thus reduces the cognitive effort for the respondents. Nevertheless, it should be noted that extreme categories of rating scales are rarely chosen anyway, especially in the context of web-based surveys.5
Six submarkets of the cultural and creative industries were comparatively well represented in the survey: Design, Music, Books, Visual Arts, Performing Arts and Software/Games. The overall assessments gave rise to three priority trend categories, which are broken down as follows:
Top trends Influence high, Market potential high, Penetration speed 3 - 5 years, Degree of transformation fundamental
Strong trends Influence high, market potential high, penetration speed 3 - 5 years, degree of transformation moderate
Relevant trends Influence moderate, market potential high, penetration rate 3 - 5 years, degree of transformation moderate 35
Top trends in the cultural and creative industries
The top trends can be found in three evaluation categories: Technology, Ecology and Economy. The greatest concentration of top trends is in the area of economy. They show which topics are classified as particularly relevant for the sector and therefore worthy of attention. These include securing skilled workers, training hybrid skills, implementing digital business models, digital marketing and promoting professional well-being. The cultural and creative industries appear here in the shadow of the corona pandemic and steadily advancing digitalization as a cross-section of overall economic challenges. Digitalization is disrupting established forms of work, production (meaning the value-creating process as a whole) and consumption and requires adjustments not only in the orientation of business activities, but also in training and further education and in making the cultural and creative industries labour market more attractive. The availability of skilled workers is a sensitive competitive and growth factor, especially in functionally highly differentiated submarkets of the industry such as film. A healthy working environment not only contributes to general satisfaction, but also has a positive effect on creativity and productivity. The availability of skills, particularly in the cultural/technical interface, strengthens the ability of cultural and creative professionals to act and promotes innovative solutions. Digitalization enables fundamentally new forms of monetization.
Artificial intelligence and sustainability are shaping the cultural and creative industries
The top trends in the technology category are the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) and internet-enabled solutions. The spread of artificial intelligence is seen by a broad range of cultural and creative professionals as a significant development that is impacting the industry with great speed and force of change. It redefines the relationship between man and machine, becomes available as a creative instrument, opens up new creative spaces and at the same time challenges our established understanding of artistic authorship and intellectual property. The technical infrastructure of the Internet and solutions based on it are also driving the development of the cultural and creative industries and are being driven by them. The software/games, broadcasting, architecture, design and advertising submarkets in particular underline the special relevance of internet-based services and the resulting prospects for value creation. The trend towards circularity dominates in the ecology category. This emphasizes the development of resource-conserving, self-contained value creation cycles that have no beginning or end point, but are constantly renewing themselves. The answers indicate that this development towards circularity is particularly relevant in the architecture submarket, where greater efforts are already being made to understand and plan the built world as a value creation cycle. However, this trend is also seen as particularly important in the film industry, the design industry, the software/games market and the performing arts, underlining the shift towards ecological sustainability as an overarching trend and competitive factor. This development is flanked by the increasing importance of "sustainable design".
Cooperation and legal framework: New paths in the cultural and creative industries
Other strong trends can be found primarily in the field of economics, but also in the political and legal area. In particular, the protection of intellectual property is an issue that is particularly relevant to the logic of profit in the cultural and creative industries, as it is in other idea- and knowledge-based industries. Advancing digitalization, new technologies, the emerging platform economy, but also the highly collaborative value creation practices within the industry are bringing the protection of intellectual property and the design of an effective legal framework into focus. At the European policy level in particular, a development can be observed that strives to legally contain digitalization and its products, to give them a European profile and thus to stand out from countries such as the USA and China in global competition. The granting of exclusive exploitation rights is seen by some schools of thought as an important prerequisite for creativity and innovation. Both aspects are a special feature of an increasingly aestheticized economy, in which the aesthetically new in the sense of a production of stimuli, sensory impressions, surprises, emotional impulses and the (supposedly) purposeless becomes the strong vanishing point of economic creation. The focus is shifting to people (customers) with their needs and demands and is being addressed with goods that do not (primarily) serve to solve problems, but instead pursue the sensory experience and human well-being. This development is also recognized as a strong trend by the respondents. Innovation practice in the cultural and creative industries is embedded in dynamic ecosystems in which collaboration with other fields of knowledge, expertise and experience is promoted and a new form of openness to ideas is cultivated. This development can also be seen in the strong emphasis on open content licensing models as a relevant trend.
Conclusions for the cultural and creative industries
The trend radar outlines an industry in transition. The developments in the areas of digital, green and social transformation, which have also been highlighted here as being formative, are already being encountered today and will (presumably) become more concrete in the medium and long term. For the Bavarian cultural and creative industries, they mean constant adjustments to the entrepreneurial orientation. However, they also mean new creative spaces, changing forms of value creation, research, development, innovation and impact in the cultural and creative industries.
1 Rust, Holger: Zukunftsillusionen - Kritik der Trendforschung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2008, p. 11.
2 Neuhaus, Christian: The trend as a tool. Instructions for using an instrument of strategic observation, Zeitschrift für Zukunftsforschung, Vol. 7 (2018) Issue 1, p. 2.
3 ibid.
4 Rohrbeck, René: Trend Scanning, Scouting and Foresight Techniques, in: Oliver Gassmann/Fiona Schweitzer (eds.), Management of the Fuzzy Front End of Inno-vation, Switzerland: Springer 2014, p. 59 - 73.
5 Bogner, Kathrin/Landrock, Uta: Antworttendenzen in standardisierten Umfragen - GESIS Survey Guidelines, GESIS Leibnitzinstitut für Sozialforschung, January 2005, p. 4, www.gesis.org/fileadmin/admin/Dateikatalog/pdf/guidelines/antworttendenzen_bogner_landrock_2015.pdf [last accessed 18.05.2024].
