Our approach to delivering the Creative Industries Access to Finance Report

The Creative Industries Business Growth and Access to Finance Discovery Report is now officially live. Produced as part of an 11-week Discovery, we worked directly with creative business leaders and UK entrepreneurs to learn about their experiences of securing finance. 

The report being made public is an important milestone, not just for our delivery team, but for our commitment to the GOV.UK service standard, and to working in the open.

Here is a brief look behind the scenes at how we approached this work, some of the approaches used, and what comes next.

Using an Orchestra Blueprint

I am fascinated by systems-led approaches to messy, fragmented service spaces. When looking at the complexity of the creative funding landscape, we realised that generic user journey mapping wasn't going to cut it. Instead, we looked to a tool that had served me well in a completely different sector: an Orchestra Blueprint. 

Originally something that I designed and shared in the context of access to care, an Orchestra Blueprint is a way of mapping complex ecosystems and intersections where distinct actors must work together to deliver a seamless user outcome. In healthcare, this is about aligning GPs, specialists, acute care, and community networks around a patient.

In the access to finance context, this same logic scaled beautifully. We used a blueprint to orchestrate how a business founder moves between fragmented public grants, equity investors, debt lenders, and the growth phases. You can see the final discovery output of this work here - AS-IS Financial landscape for growing UK businesses. 

This map is currently being used to show the sheer scale and complexity that a Single Front Door initiative for access to finance needs to address. 

Standardisation using service patterns

When it came to building out the recommendations for a proposed Single Front Door, we deliberately avoided creating a generic wishlist.

Instead, we applied a strict service patterns methodology to recommendations, built entirely upon our qualitative research. 

We mapped out consistent, repeatable service stages:

• discover finance options (entry pattern)
• understand finance (educate and translating pattern)
• access and apply for finance (data sharing and reducing friction pattern)

By using recognisable service patterns, we ensured that any future Alpha and Beta phases wouldn't be starting from scratch. There is now a standardised framework to work from rooted in proven digital delivery standards.

Working and publishing in the open

For future teams working with the report, this provides an evidenced set of user needs to benchmark against. These 46 founder needs are now ready to be tested further with the investor community. There are still key areas to learn more about: for example, what stops an angel network or venture capitalist from meeting these needs today? And, what are the most significant operational challenges? 

Importantly, publishing a report in the open isn't just a celebratory moment; it's a mechanism for system accountability. Doing discovery work in this way, and knowing that this needs to stand up to public scrutiny, is hard. However, sharing the report in the open also means we create space for repeatable frameworks that the wider public sector can use. 

Service designers and policy specialists can now read the report, and the work here can be adapted and reused in different contexts.

If you want to learn more about this work, get in touch with Jas.