The cultural and creative industries refer to those parts of the modern economy where culture is produced and distributed through industrial means, applying the creativity of individuals and groups to the generation of original cultural product, which may have commercial value either through direct sale to consumers or as intellectual property. The cultural and creative industries typically bring together the arts, media, and design sectors, with a focus upon convergent digital technologies and the challenges and opportunities of globalization. While discussion of the cultural and creative industries can be traced back to the 1940s, it was in the 1990s and 2000s that they came to prominence as both an academic and a policy issue. Policy strategies to develop the cultural and creative industries are typically associated with expanding markets for cultural goods and services. They seek to develop these industries by promoting innovation and creativity, leading to the development of original forms of intellectual property and supporting industries based around culture and entertainment. In some instances, such as culture-led urban regeneration strategies, cultural and creative industries are positioned as an alternative to traditional manufacturing industries. As an academic field, interest in the cultural and creative industries has ranged across communication, media and cultural studies, economic and cultural geography, the creative and performing arts, and applied cultural economics.

UNCTAD definition of the creative industries

The creative industries:

• are the cycles of creation, production and distribution of goods and services that use creativity and intellectual capital as primary inputs;

• constitute a set of knowledgebased activities, focused on but not limited to arts, potentially generating revenues from trade and intellectual property rights;

• comprise tangible products and intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives;

• are at the cross-road among the artisan, services and industrial sectors;

 • constitute a new dynamic sector in world trade

There is no universal definition of cultural and creative sectors (CCS).

In 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched a project to develop a measurement system to classify cultural activities, publishing a preliminary guidance document on defining and measuring the sector in 1979 (Horowitz, 1981). Over the following two decades, policy interest in the economic benefits that culture and creativity provide began to grow and various definitions, methodologies and approaches began to be used to classify and measure its impact at both national and international levels. However, even defining in theoretical terms what constitutes a cultural or creative sector is not straightforward, and this complexity is compounded by differences in the availability of data, as well as aggregations used, in national industrial classification systems.

There is no consistency in terminology relating to CCS.

Early policy work by UNESCO and others referenced cultural activities. By the late 1990s terminology had shifted towards cultural industries, reflecting a greater focus on the economic benefit they provide. A further shift in terminology occurred in the early 2000s, with policy work referencing creative industries, encompassing a wider range of activities which were not as overtly cultural as traditional sectors (such as dance or music), but required significant amounts of creativity (such as advertising or architecture). The broadening of definitional approaches continued, with recent work using the terminology of cultural or creative ecosystems, to denote the importance of culture and creativity to all aspects of the economy (UNESCO/UNDP, 2013[2]). In this report, we prefer the term cultural and creative sectors (CCS), as it acknowledges both the significant contribution of not-for-profits and publicly funding organisations to the ecosystem of creative work (which may be inadvertently overlooked when referring solely to industries) and reflects the integrated nature of these sectors in other industry spaces (for example, the relevance of design for car manufacturing).

Conceptualize CCS is non-trivial.

The cultural cycle model of CCS developed by UNESCO (UNESCO, 2009[3]) conceptualises CCS in regards to a production cycle, with relevant activities being those which contribute to the creation, production, dissemination, exhibition/reception/transmission or consumption/participation of cultural products and services. Similarly, The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) distinguishes between upstream and downstream creative activities, with upstream activities relating more to production of creative and cultural goods and downstream activities relating more to the market (UNCTAD, 2010[4]). A further approach, which focuses more on creative and cultural inputs, is the concentric circles model of CCS (Throsby, 2008[5]) which describes a core of artistic activity, surrounded by concentric circles of broader cultural and creative actives which require increasingly less artistic labour to fulfil their functions. What these models, as whole, attest to, is the broad scope of CCS and the heterogeneity of activities it includes.

National definitions of CCS also vary in scope.

For example, some countries include information technology (IT) consultancy services and software development in their definition of CCS, whereas other countries only include the videogames component of software development. Some countries include amusement parks, cultural education, sport, tourism or gastronomy, whereas others exclude these sectors. A few countries include social science and humanities research and development and some countries have a specific category for circus. These national level definitions typically reflect variations in national policy priorities and data availability, but they also reflect, in part, the absence of a widely recognized international statistical standard

There are some classification of creative and cultural industries.

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