Completed Arts, Culture & Design Economics & Business

Improving Investment Readiness for SMEs in the Creative Industries

Funder InnovateUK (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Creator Capital Limited
Funding £99K
Period Mar 2025 — Sept 2025

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A new financial readiness toolkit will use behavioural insights and gamification to help creative SMEs in Coventry and Warwickshire—particularly gaming studios—overcome systemic barriers to investment. Why this matters: Creative businesses, especially small gaming studios, often struggle to secure funding because traditional investors like banks and venture capital firms see uncertain short-term returns. This problem has worsened since the pandemic, and the region’s high concentration of gaming studios makes it especially acute. The project tackles a gap: no tailored financial-readiness tool currently exists for the creative industries. If successful, the toolkit will give SMEs a proprietary index that scores their financial positioning and offers practical steps to improve it. This could shift how creative businesses access capital, making them more attractive to investors without requiring them to abandon their creative focus. For Coventry and Warwickshire, the project aims to establish the region as a hub for growth-supporting innovations in the creative sector. The 6-month project is a de-risking step: without Innovate UK funding, the uncertain short-term ROI would deter private investment, even though the scalable solution could yield substantial economic and societal benefits.

View original technical description
Creare Capital is a funding-finding platform for creative and digital businesses, where we are dedicated to improving access to finance for the creative industries. Through this project, we will develop a financial readiness toolkit tailored to creative SMEs, leveraging behavioural insights and gamification to tackle systemic barriers to funding. Our approach will develop the first-of-its-kind financial readiness toolkit for the creative industries. Our MVP will result in a proprietary index that provides cluster businesses with practical, pathways to improve their positioning, enhancing their economic viability. With the primary target audience being SMEs in the gaming sub-sector, we tackle an issue that has been exacerbated post-Covid and disproportionally affects the cluster given the high concentration of gaming studios. This 6-month project will position Coventry and Warwickshire as a hub for cutting-edge solutions that support growth and resilience in the creative industries. The innovative combination of behavioural, financial and cluster insights to develop novel IP, presents significant technical and market challenges that traditional VC or bank funding would not support due to uncertain short-term ROI. By de-risking the project, Innovate UK funding enables the development of an innovative, scalable solution with substantial economic and societal benefits.

View the original record at the funder ↗

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Original classification

Grant for R&D

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