Paul Stoneman: Soft innovation: economics, product aesthetics and creative industries [Book Review]

The journey towards carving out a place for the creative industries within innovation research, scholarship, policy and programme planning and delivery has barely begun. Public policy’s interest in innovation is relatively recent, being formed in a context in which western (and, increasingly, non-western) governments have re-introduced themselves to an active interventionary role in a number of areas of industry and human capital development—set against the small government and deregulatory trends of the 1970s and 1980s and the end of the Keynesian settlement. These interests have followed a largely science- and technology-based template for what counts as innovation and R&D largely in the agriculture, manufacturing and mining sectors, based resolutely on the OECD’s Oslo and Frascati manuals. There has however been an increasing need to accommodate the arguments and evidence for innovation in the services sector. This has been poorly served by technological product and process (TPP) approaches to innovation, even though the evidence from innovation surveys suggests that most innovation occurs in services, which make up the biggest part of all modern economies.