Delighted our @CreativePEC systematic literature review of creative clusters, is now out: https://bit.ly/32d7IhI  We read 355 relevant academic papers on creative clusters! A quick thread on our findings, and how @CreativePEC are filling the gaps (1/n)

There is a lot of research on 'creative clusters' but definitions vary by sector and geography. While some studies consider all 'creative industries', clustering in sectors (e.g. film/TV) are widely studied but other sectors (e.g. advertising, publishing) much less so (2/n)

Using text mining we explore the topics covered in the literature, and find vast differences - the aspects of creative clusters studied vary by sector and geography - papers on clustering in fashion cover almost completely different topics from papers on IT/software (3/n)

Geographical definitions of clusters vary, from neighbourhood to (quite large) regions. A lot of this comes down to the methods used, but what makes a cluster remains an interesting and important question, especially given the UK levelling up agenda (4/n)

Creative cluster research is to date largely concentrated in Europe, North America and some parts of Asia. Relatively little research in our sample on creative clusters in the Global South - more papers in our data studying Toronto than all of Africa or South America! (5/n)

(Academic) creative clusters research has (naturally) been concentrated in regional studies/economic geography, but we identify a lot of space for multidisciplinary research (for instance there's fairly little research on management of organisations in creative clusters) (6/n)

Creative clusters research has been largely qualitative, and while there is now more quantitative research (esp. outside the creative class literature), we found few studies that would meet standards for inclusion in @whatworksgrowth reviews. (7/n)

So given this overview, what is @CreativePEC doing to address these gaps? On the need for robust evidence, @iammaxnathan ( https://pec.ac.uk/blog/a-first-look-at-connections) and @ndrlee ( https://pec.ac.uk/discussion-papers/relatedness-between-creative-industries-and-wider-economy) are doing work on the economic impact of UK creative clusters (8/n)

The PEC International Council ( https://www.pec.ac.uk/people/the-international-council) is sharing some fantastic global perspectives in the PEC blog, and on the geographical definitions of creative clusters, our @SPRU team have some really interesting work forthcoming on how we map UK creative clusters. (9/n)

Lots more work to do, and lots more coming online soon to share. In the meantime, thanks to our @SPRU @SussexUBusiness team (inc @Pat_casadei @velezjorge @MJBloom_ + Roberto Camerani, Monica Masucci) for their hard work reading and analysing all these papers! (10/ends)