Which Regions of Russia are Ready to Support Creative Industries?
The authors (Victoria Boos, Mikhail Gershman, Leonid Gokhberg, Evgeny Kutsenko, Tatyana Ostashchenko) noted that the development of creative industries in the regions is most facilitated by the presence of large cities, concentration of students at leading universities, high level of digitalization, active policies of authorities and the activities of creative clusters. The administrative status of the territory and the industrial component of the economy are not among the significant drivers of the development of the creative sector.
The top-10 of the ranking includes Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk region, Tomsk region, the Republic of Tatarstan, Ivanovo region, Belgorod region, Nizhny Novgorod region, Kostroma region and Sverdlovsk regions. In addition to those listed, 11 more regions, classified as “leaders”, demonstrate not only the most significant results of the creative industries, but also a wide range of prerequisites favorable to their development.
Approximately 40% of the regions included in the ranking system achieve comparable results in the development of the creative sector, adhering to alternative scenarios. For instance, some regions of the Russian Federation (most concentrated in the European part of the country) utilize significant cultural potential and develop creative industries primarily according to an “evolutionary” scenario. Other regions (their geography is shifted towards the Privolzhsky Federal District) are implementing a more practice-oriented (“effective”) scenario with a clear commercial focus. The regions of the Arctic zone are aimed at cooperation and consolidation of creative capital with the involvement of various regions of the Russian Federation.
The ranking results show that regions differ in the level of development of the creative economy much more significantly than in the cultural sector. For example, a comparison of the indicators for Russian regions from the top-10 and the bottom-10 reveals a gap between them in the average value of the “Economy of Creative Industries” subindex by 6.7 times, and in the average value of the “Cultural Environment” subindex by 1.7 times.
«The results of our research show that a developed creative sector is not an exclusive privilege of wealthy regions or regions with deep historical and cultural traditions. It is possible to develop the creative sector based on media industries, which use various mechanisms for monetization and protection of intellectual property, as well as based on the less technologically developed industries and more prone to individual creativity, for example, fashion and design. Moreover, many hybrid regional develpment scenarios are possible. In this regard, it is especially important to analyse already established creative profile of the region, as well as the role «path dependency» and regional and federal policies play in it in order to understand the optimal future vector for the development of creative economy», - says Victoria Boos, leading expert of HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge and Centre for Russian Cluster Observatory.
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