Designing for a Living? Income Determinants Among Firm Founders in the Dutch Design Sector

Abstract

Many studies have analysed the role of the creative class in fostering regional development. The focus on regional development neglects the individual differences in success among members in the creative class and among firms within creative industries. We study firm founders in three design sectors (industrial design, graphic design and web design) and analyse the determinants of their personal income. Next to individual factors affecting income differences among designers, we look at the relational and spatial contexts in which designers operate. Hence, we can also assess whether spatial clustering and organisational networking are beneficial for designers. The main result, based on 200 telephonic questionnaires, holds that income is determined mainly by business experience and the use of advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), while education and spatial clustering have no impact. We argue that policies in the design sector should be oriented towards helping young designers to gain experience as well as towards life-long learning in the use of ICTs.

Keywords::

• Creative class
• creative industries
• design
• spin-off
• localisation economies
• ICT

Keywords::

• L84
• O3

Notes

¹ Design Council (2011) reports that about one-third of UK designers work in in-house teams.

² For example, registering a trademark in Europe costs about 1,000 euro.

³ For the respondents who did not want to answer or could not answer, it has been examined whether this answer alternatively is correlated with other variables. This is done to check whether there is a bias towards firms with certain properties. For example, larger firms could be less willing to answer the question, which would lead to a biased sample. However, the correlations with other variables are very low (i.e. around 0.1), indicating that the income distribution is not susceptible to this bias.

⁴ Note that this result fits in a growing number of empirical studies, the results of which tend to question that clustering benefit firms (for a recent review, see Frenken et al., 2011).