The location of creative industries in a developing country:The case of Indonesia

This study examines the occurrence and spatial patterns of creative industries in the context of a developing country, specifically Indonesia. Our findings show that, in the context of Indonesia, it is crucial to distinguish between innovative creative industries and traditional cultural industries. The first category represents those that exploit new knowledge and intellectual property. The latter industries tend to preserve heritage values as selling points and, in Indonesia, they are actually much more significant in economic terms than creative industries and therefore should be taken into account. The spatial patterns of the two industries also differ. Creative industries are likely to concentrate in large urban regions, where innovation and cross-fertilisation of ideas can take place with the support of talent pooling and relatedness among niche producers. The Indonesian case is no exception. Meanwhile, traditional cultural industries are much less dependent on human capital and urbanisation economies. The results of this study suggest that policy strategies aimed at creative industries would be applicable in reasonably advanced regions provided they have sufficient human capital and economic diversification. In comparison, regions specialising in traditional cultural industries can adopt a different strategy to optimise the impact of these industries. Currently, the creative industry policy does not make this distinction. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.