Clwstwr Creadigol: Research and Development for a high performing creative cluster in Wales

The Cardiff region of South Wales was a screen industries pace-setter when the UK adopted its creative industries mission in the late 1990s. Success was built upon the supply chains of a strong independent television sector, anchored by three Cardiff-based public service broadcasters. In the last five years the screen marketplace has been disrupted and enlarged by internet-based on-demand distribution platforms. Both anchor broadcasters and the broader screen industry know that without sustained and shrewd innovation, they will struggle. Today, screen industries reach far beyond television, taking in gaming and global markets for all kinds of on-demand storytelling on screens which range in size from wrist-watch to IMAX. Today's direct competition for broadcasters includes Amazon, Google, Netflix and Apple. Cardiff's screen industries must innovate rapidly if they are to challenge for leadership in new market segments. Clwstwr Creadigol brings together the broadcasters (BBC, ITV, S4C) with a rich array of over 60 companies: independent TV producers, writers, games designers, software writers, marketing agents, drone-fliers, tech startups, data scientists and storytellers. Our missionis is to create and deliver - through a Screen Innovation System (SIS) and a News Innovation Lab (NIL) - an R&D programme that will enable Cardiff to move from being a media production centre and location to a high value screen cluster. Based on six months of intense conversation with our business partners and other collaborators, these initiatives will be equipped and designed to respond to external opportunities, changing technologies (e.g. emergence of 5G mobile infrastructure) and shifting patterns of consumption. Both the SIS and NIL will house R&D leading to new products, services and experiences at three levels: - Sectoral interventions designed to have a tangible and broad economic benefit. These will be aimed the screen sector in the cluster (e.g. work with S4C to develop new platforms for data analytics, which will benefit the cluster's many screen independents producing bilingual content), or at businesses across the UK (e.g. the development of networks systems designed to monetise the UK community news sector). - Business interventions designed to boost short-form screen content supply, range, experimentation and richness - a staple requirement for on-demand screen services in entertainment and news, as well as in routine B2B and B2C communication - and enhance ambition for IP creation and ownership beyond core screen products e.g. product extension options in games, publishing and merchandise. - Collaborative interventions to capitalise on the creative energy that emerges from collabriations between micro-businesses and freelancers and on the emerging strength of the city's creative hubs. These are ambitious ideas, but they are grounded in the ambitions of businesses in our cluster, as reflected in the sample Letters of Support. This level of ambition is matched by this proposal's unprecedented collaboration of Cardiff's three universities. University of South Wales' offer includes a new Film & TV School and the award-winning Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. Cardiff Metropolitan University excels in product and service design, serving business customers across the UK and in a number of international markets. Cardiff University has the UK's top journalism school and is home to Creative Cardiff, established in 2015 to enhance the university's contribution to success in the regional creative economy. Creative Cardiff's reputation underpins our confidence in delivering this proposal to the very highest of standards. What would success look like? Over a five-year span, we show that enhanced R&D collaboration spurs innovation and increases the pace and quality of growth in the screen industries. This results in decisions to build on Clwstwr Creadigol's success across the creative industries in Wales.