Deimantė Krisiukėnienė

Both researchers and policymakers increasingly recognize the importance of creative industries within the broader economy. While previous studies have primarily examined their innovation activities and knowledge diffusion through labor mobility and relatedness, considerably less attention has been devoted to their structural position within intersectoral production networks. This study examines the structural embeddedness of creative industries in the EU-27 by constructing weighted directed relatedness networks from aggregated input–output tables for 2010 and 2022. The findings show that creative industries occupy highly connected and structurally central positions within European production networks, suggesting that they may support coordination during value-chain adjustment and economic adaptation. Creative industries also maintain strong relationships with education, scientific research and development, information and communication, and professional service sectors, highlighting their integration within knowledge-intensive economic activities. The study further reveals a pronounced disassortative network structure, indicating that highly connected sectors tend to be linked to less-connected industries. By shifting the analytical perspective from spatial concentration to structural embeddedness, the study contributes to the relatedness and creative industries literature through an input–output network framework that provides new insights into the organization of European production networks.

Research background: innovation is a key factor in determining the growth of the creative industries sector. However, it also highlights the importance of the creative industries to the broader innovation process within the wider economy. Synergies between the creative industries and companies in other sectors create conditions for the diffusion of new tech-nologies. Creative industries companies typically utilise a large, diverse network of relationships, facilitating easy access to new knowledge and faster assimilation. Purpose of the article: the purpose is to present a sys-tematic literature review of research papers on creative industries, innova-tion diffusion and network analysis, and to identify future research direc-tions. Methods: this paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of 54 articles on innovation diffusion networks within the creative industries, as indexed in the Web of Science database. Findings & Value: the study reveals that innovation diffusion within the creative industries has positive effects within the sector and across the broader economy. The review also reveals that qualitative and mixed-method approaches domi-nate the current research landscape, indicating a need for more robust quantitative modelling in future studies. Results from scientific research analysing the impact of innovation diffusion networks on the creative in-dustries sector have shown that existing networks significantly affect the social and economic environment of other industries, regions and the na-tional economy. Although the authors emphasise the importance of net-works for the diffusion of innovations in the creative industries sector, few empirical studies have focused on identifying these networks.

The development of the concept of creative industries is related to the contribution of culture and creativity to the economy. Creative industries are often associated with innovation.Scientific literature reveals that creative business is more innovative compared to other sectors of the economy. Some authors also note that when assessing the level of innovation, the companies that are closely related to creative industries tend to have higher innovation rates. The concept of creativity is closely related to the major purpose of innovation, i.e. problem solving, while synergy between creativity and economy formulates creative industries theory. Based on the literature, problem solution requires creativity, and some solutions can inspire the emergence of innovation. The major purpose of this article is to provide the theoretical presumptions of the creative industries innovation productivity performance. Applying the method of comparative literature analysis, this article presents a conceptual model that allows to evaluate and compare countries economies in terms of the productivity in the creative industries innovation performance.