Read first part of the article series: Creative Economy Growing in the Dark – Measurement Problems Hinder Investment
Measuring the creative economy has proven to be a challenging task. As noted in the first part of this article series, the industry’s fragmented structure, rapid change, and outdated statistical methods make it difficult to form a comprehensive picture. This leads to a cycle where investments are hard to justify without reliable data.
Fortunately, solutions exist. In this article, we explore the most promising tools and methods for measuring the true value and impact of the creative economy – from traditional satellite accounting to AI-based solutions.
Solutions for Measuring the Creative Economy
One of the most promising tools for measuring the creative economy is satellite accounting. True to its name, it examines the economy as if from a satellite’s perspective, offering a broader view than traditional measurement methods. This statistical tool enables comprehensive measurement of the industry’s economic impact in a way that seamlessly integrates with national accounts.
Finland is a pioneer in this regard. Since 1995, Statistics Finland has produced cultural satellite accounts, providing nationally comparable data on cultural sector development. The system follows the same model used to measure tourism’s impacts. The latest data is from 2022, with a typical update delay of 22 months.
Satellite accounting broadly covers culture’s economic impacts. It measures culture’s share of GDP and domestic demand, including data on production, value added, employment, and consumption expenditure. The current system provides an overview of the entire cultural sector, which produced output worth 15.3 billion euros in 2022. Statistics Finland’s open database doesn’t separate market-based output (commercial sectors like films and games) from non-market cultural activities (like libraries), instead combining both values. The creative economy’s weak link is the lack of business-oriented approach in collecting strategic information.
England has developed an even more ambitious system concept than Finland’s. The Multi-Regional Cultural and Creative Industries Satellite Account (MR-CISA) is currently a theoretical model aiming to map how economic impacts flow between regions. It wouldn’t just show where money is spent but would also track investment spillover effects across regions.
MR-CISA would focus on three main areas: inter-industry connections (such as film industry impacts on tourism or game studios’ links to IT services), inter-regional money flows, and final consumer demand. The system’s practical benefits would materialize especially when evaluating public investment effectiveness. While such a model hasn’t yet been implemented in practice, its development could offer valuable tools for measuring and understanding the creative economy. So far, the challenges in implementing the MR-CISA model have been in its operational scope, which practically means the work is slow and extremely expensive.
The American Model Shows a Circular Framework
When discussing the television and film industry, the market leader United States naturally emerges as a point of comparison. While Finland has proven quite skilled in developing satellite accounting, Americans have taken measurement further in both scope and regularity.
The U.S.-created ACPSA (Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account) represents one of the world’s most comprehensive creative industry measurement systems. Its particular strength lies in its circular thinking model, which considers the entire value chain of creative activity. This approach helps understand how creative industries operate and influence each other in layers.
At the core of the circular model are purely creative functions, such as art, music, and literature, where creative content plays the main role. The next circle contains industries commercially exploiting creativity, such as advertising, architecture, and media. The outer circle includes sectors that benefit indirectly from creative activity, such as IT services and software development.
Although both Finland and the United States are among the world’s most advanced countries in measuring creative industries, and both systems are integrated into national accounts, the American model stands out in several ways. It provides state-specific information in addition to national level data, and its information updates more frequently than Finland’s system, where the latest data is almost two years old.
The Americans’ more standardized approach stands out favorably when Finland’s system acknowledges there’s no internationally agreed method for cultural satellite accounting. Additionally, the American system’s data is more readily available to support officials’ and politicians’ decisions and can be utilized jointly through interactive tools and clear research summaries.
The Next Step Through Northern AI?
Satellite accounting sounds not only extremely boring but also very expensive. Just defining the overall picture and calculating investment potential requires significant resources. Fortunately, a new, potentially more affordable, faster, and even more accurate way of processing information has emerged in the discussion.
The solution to definition challenges could lie in a joint Nordic AI-supported situation room. If Finland can’t find a broad enough economic front between KAVI, Yle, SES, and Business Finland’s data-hungry analysts, a joint Nordic project with EU funding could open new opportunities.
Such a system wouldn’t just collect national data but would model an inter-regional MR-CISA system, introducing a standardized model for measuring the creative economy. AI could revolutionize data collection: automatic data collection would replace the universally hated manual economic situation surveys. Natural language processing could analyze company descriptions and identify “hidden” operators, such as equipment companies or media technology companies lurking in wrong categories. A joint situation room would give Nordic countries a competitive advantage in the international market.
However, AI’s possibilities extend even further. It could build real-time monitoring and identify underreported investments and innovations that current methods overlook. AI could analyze spillover effects more efficiently and identify complex economic patterns between regions. Data quality would improve as advanced analytics could cross-check information from different sources and fill gaps in inter-regional trade data.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this AI scenario is its economic feasibility: it could lower data collection costs while improving accuracy. It might also be the only way to build visibility into where the creative economy now grows in complete darkness. This could be the first domino piece that finally falls and opens doors to controlled investments and international growth in the creative economy.
Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs happen when someone decides to solve the boring problems that no one else bothers to think about. Measuring the creative economy isn’t a media-sexy topic, but right now it’s the key to the entire industry’s future. This challenge, too, can be solved together – and it could become a significant competitive advantage for the Nordic creative economy.
