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This paper extends research on innovating firms' access to finance in the creative industries. While we know that entrepreneurial firms experience barriers to applying for funding and difficulties in securing positive outcomes, prior studies have shown that firms may use patents to signal innovative quality to potential investors. Yet these studies typically focus on R&D-oriented innovation in 'traditional' technological sectors. Creative industries firms have different innovation characteristics that may influence the funding process, including the uncertainty of content-based product markets, the highly-imbalanced information asymmetries between creative entrepreneurs and conservative investors, and the symbolic and intangible nature of their innovations. Using the UK's Creative Industries Council's unique cross-sectional survey data of 575 firms we analyse the extent to which innovating firms seek to apply to and achieve funding from a wide range of potential sources. We find little evidence that prior innovative activities provide a meaningful signal, positive or negative, to potential funders for creative industries firms. This suggests that the highly intangible and symbolic nature of innovation in creative industries businesses is unreliable as an indicator of quality. The reliance of owners on personal capital is congruent with recent literature on the high levels of social and personal capital among workers in the creative industries. We suggest that the specific challenges creative firms face may be addressed through new financial and policy instruments to feed and sustain these high-growth, innovating industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative skills, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills and management skills have all been positively associated with firm performance as well as regional growth. But do firms that combine these types of skills in their workforce grow more quickly than those that do not? We compare the impact of STEM, creative and management skills on their own, and in various combinations, on turnover growth. We use a longitudinal dataset of UK firms over the period 2008–2014 with lagged turnover data to explore whether the combination of skills used by a firm impacts its future turnover growth. Using fixed-effect panel and pooled OLS models, we find that the performance benefits associated with both STEM and creative skills materialize when they are combined with each other or with management skills rather than when they are deployed on their own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore whether firms that have received VC investment are subject to the same recessionary pressures as other small firms, or if receipt of VC incurs resilience to macroeconomic turbulence. It examines the survival and exit patterns of UK venture capital investments during the Great Recession of 2008-9, and compares these patterns to the dot-com boom and bust of 1999-2001. Using a dataset of over 5000 investments made by UK Venture Capital Trusts (VCT) from 1995-2009, the paper uses using Cox survival models to examine the impact of macroeconomic turbulence on duration of investment. The paper finds that in contrast to high exit rates during the dot-com period, firms receiving VCT investment were significantly been less likely to exit by failure or other means during the recession of 2008-9. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]