This paper extends research on innovating firms’ access to finance in the creative industries. While we know that entrepreneurial firms experience barriers to applying for funding and difficulties in securing positive outcomes, prior studies have shown that firms may use patents to signal innovative quality to potential investors. Yet these studies typically focus on R&D-oriented innovation in ‘traditional’ technological sectors. Creative industries firms have different innovation characteristics that may influence the funding process, including the uncertainty of content-based product markets, the highly-imbalanced information asymmetries between creative entrepreneurs and conservative investors, and the symbolic and intangible nature of their innovations. Using the UK‘s Creative Industries Council‘s unique cross-sectional survey data of 575 firms we analyse the extent to which innovating firms seek to apply to and achieve funding from a wide range of potential sources. We find little evidence that prior innovative activities provide a meaningful signal, positive or negative, to potential funders for creative industries firms. This suggests that the highly intangible and symbolic nature of innovation in creative industries businesses is unreliable as an indicator of quality. The reliance of owners on personal capital is congruent with recent literature on the high levels of social and personal capital among workers in the creative industries. We suggest that the specific challenges creative firms face may be addressed through new financial and policy instruments to feed and sustain these high-growth, innovating industries.

Retractions warn users against relying on problematic evidence. Until recently, it has not been possible to systematically examine the influence of retracted research on policy literature. Here, we use three databases to measure the extent of the phenomenon, and explore what it might tell us about the users of such evidence. We identify policy relevant documents that cite retracted research, we review and categorise the nature of citations, and we interview policy document authors. Overall, we find 2.3% of retracted research is policy cited. This seems higher than one might have expected, similar even to some notable benchmarks for ‘normal’ non-retracted research that is policy-cited. The phenomenon is also multifaceted. Firstly, certain types of retracted research (those with errors, types 1 and 4) are more likely to be policy-cited than other types (those without errors, types 2 and 3). Secondly, although some policy relevant documents cite retracted research negatively, positive citations are twice as common and frequently occur after retraction. Thirdly, certain types of policy organisations appear better at identifying problematic research, and are perhaps more discerning when selecting and evaluating research.

The notion of creative clusters has become the focus of a growing number of policy initiatives aimed at revitalizing economies by means of creativity. However, despite their prominence in policy discourse, creative clusters are still a ‘fuzzy’ concept, defined and treated differently in different strands of research. To address these disparities, this paper presents a systematic literature review of creative cluster research (CCR), with the aim of: (1) exploring the state of the art in the field, (2) pointing out some important limitations, and (3) outlining a future research agenda. A total of 355 articles published between 1986 and 2019 were analysed, drawing upon a combination of manual coding, bibliometric analysis, and text mining techniques. This multi-method approach allowed us to provide both a meta-analysis of CCR and an exploration of its thematic content. In so doing, our paper contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how creative clusters have been studied over time, both broadly and in relation to different creative sectors and geographical contexts. Moreover, through the identification of research gaps and boundaries of knowledge in the field, it points to key methodological and conceptual development issues to be addressed in future studies.