Iain Hamilton is Head of Creative Industries at Highlands and Islands Enterprise, which set up the public-private partnership XpoNorth (pictured above). This is a transcript of remarks he gave at the CIC Place Forum held on 26 September 2024.
I work for the Scottish Government's Economic and Community Development Agency with a specific remit on the creative industries. Our interest is commercial activity and ways to generate income with the assets, knowledge and skills you have, but we also try support any type of organisation.
To give some context, the population of the Highlands and Islands is only about 500,000 people but the area is half the size of Scotland. Our creative industries sector is predominantly made up of microbusinesses, sole traders and freelancers many of whom are poorly captured in official economic statistics and are widely dispersed across the region.
We have seen growing demand for creative skills and links with creative businesses from non-creative sectors that are looking for solutions and talent. So whilst a couple of speakers have raised the need to recognise the differences between the sub-sectors, our focus is the opposite. It is about looking for crossovers, where you can learn from different subsectors or sectors and understand the opportunities this creates. The other thing worth highlighting is our definition of the creative economy. As an Economic and Community Development Agency, our focus is on cultural skills, knowledge and ideas but also how that relates to communities, businesses and individuals. Its looking at how we can get that spread and combine them.
In the Highlands and Islands, we have been looking at how to build up networks and opportunities across the area. The standard support programmes offered by development agencies do not fit the creative sector well. Businesses see themselves differently, growth patterns can be irregular and the focus for some may not be on building a business, but instead how to get specific content out to market. Another challenge for us is how to retain young people in the region.
Whilst it has improved in recent years, they are an underused resource for our area which can address the skills gaps that businesses have. SDS research (2022) showed that 31% of Highland Region pupils in S4-S6 wishes to work in the sector and that almost 7,000 people left the region for FE and HE, with 30% enrolling in creative courses.
We provided specialist support for the sector by establishing a public-private partnership called XpoNorth. What we looked at will not be a surprise to anyone here, but it is safe to say these issues are more acute in rural geographies like our own. For example, issues around access to information, finance and skills, identifying and accessing new market opportunities, barriers to scaling, digital innovation and geography.
The five key areas of support are: tailored advisory services, knowledge dissemination and hybrid networking, global collaborations, young people and practical activations for market access. Global collaboration is really important to us, and we work with other organisations like Creative Scotland, global businesses (e.g. Spotify, Universal) and key decision-makers within industry to provide the best possible advice and encourage collaboration. We also have a digital platform providing specialist digital support for the creative economy, as part of the Northern Innovation Hub which is a project funded through the Inverness and Highland City Region Deal.
But our partnership with Smartify gives a real sense of what we have been working on. We wanted to look at how museums could be a source of inspiration for creatives and how we could create digital content to engage global audiences and promote the heritage and stories of the region. We partnered with Smartify, the world's biggest app for galleries and museums used by the likes of the National Galleries of Scotland, to pilot the app for nine local museums. We have since seen an 80% growth in the number of people engaging each month through the app, tapping into new markets and becoming an example for Smartify to show how they can bring together a very dispersed group of small museums.
To sum things up, a rural region like ours has a unique offer and we can gain a global audience. But to do so, we need a way for audiences to engage and our businesses need to be given a context to come together and access opportunities. A one size fit all from urban centres does not work well. The support we provide is practical and specific to the needs of our local sectors. Over the last three years of the current programme, we have dealt with 1,760 unique businesses and enterprises and delivered around 15,000 hours of support.
Image: Highlands and Islands Enterprise
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