Predictive intelligence for creative economies

The Fifth Sector helps places and organisations understand the creative and knowledge economy; not just what exists now, but what's likely to emerge over the short and medium term.

Over the last 15 years, we've mapped creative sectors across the UK and internationally; understanding their structure, capacity, talent flows and market dynamics. That deep analysis informs everything we do. But analysis of the present is only half the story; the harder question, the one that matters for strategy, is what comes next.

We've demonstrated across more than 100 projects that effective planning requires foresight: a clear understanding of how changes in production, infrastructure, policy and investment will reshape workforce demand before those changes land. Policymakers need to target funding where it will have maximum impact, not where problems used to be. Employers need to anticipate talent bottlenecks, not react to them. Universities need to know which skills will be scarce in 36 months, not which skills were scarce last year.

We now work with policymakers, employers and universities to build that foresight; integrating production data, infrastructure investment, workforce trends, policy flows and funding patterns to map causation and forecast demand. This approach is grounded in our 30 years of sector-specialist experience in understanding how creative economies actually work, not how policy papers say they work.

Let’s talk about what’s coming next