This research investigates innovation in how film producers use social digital tools to engage consumers, reduce demand uncertainty and respond to the challenge of digital disruption that affects the traditional film value chain. Through three empirical case studies of film production and exploitation, we examine examples of innovation in product, service, distribution, marketing and process, each having important implications at the organizational level. Our findings show that innovations in one area have important implications for other areas, distribution impacting on concepts of product and service, for example. We also show that internal firm micro-process dynamics impact directly on external interactions between the firm, consumers en masse and partner firms. Our research thus lies at the nexus of innovation, social media and uncertainty management, and questions the boundaries found in innovation 'types' or dominant taxonomies in traditional R&D frames. *This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council Capacity Building Cluster Grant RES 187-24-0014Introduction Film production is facing increasing challenges caused by declining revenues from DVD and TV rights exploitation. Digital tools, applied in new marketing and distribution models, form innovative strategic responses to major threats to film businesses caused by digital disruption (UKFC, 2010). These interventions, however, occur far earlier in the product life cycle and are undertaken by different parties than has traditionally been the case and can be seen as the active management of consumer demand uncertainty (Miller & Shamsie, 1999;Dempster, 2006). We ask how social digital tools are applied to manage uncertainty in the UK film business and adopt an empirical case study approach to investigate this. In doing so, we address a gap in the literature at the nexus of innovation, social media and uncertainty management in a specific creative industry, film. Whilst Dempster (2006) explores risk and uncertainty management in theatre and Sgourev (2012) deals with risk and innovation in opera, the specific 'spreadable' nature of digital media (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2012) has not been explored in an innovation context for managing uncertainty in this setting.

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Creativity is at the vanguard of contemporary capitalism, valorized as a form of capital in its own right. It is the centrepiece of the vaunted ‘creative economy’, and within the latter, the creative industries. But what is economic about creativity? How can creative labour become the basis for a distinctive global industry? And how has the solitary artist, a figment of Romantic thought, become the creative entrepreneur of twenty-first-century economic imagining? Such questions have long provoked scholars interested in economics, sociology, management and law. This book offers a fresh approach to the theoretical problems of cultural economy, through a focus on intellectual property (IP) within the creative industries. IP and its associated rights (IPR) are followed as they journey through the creative economy, creating a hybrid IP/IPR that shapes creative products and configures the economic agency of creative producers. The book argues that IP/IPR is the central mechanism in organizing the market for creative goods, helping to manage risk, settle what is valuable, extract revenues, and protect future profits.. Most importantly, IP/IPR is crucial in the dialectic between symbolic and economic value on which the creative industries depend: IP/IPR hold the creative industries together. The book is based on a detailed empirical study of creative producers in the UK, extending sociological studies of markets to an analysis of the UK’s creative industries. It makes an important, empirically grounded contribution to debates around creativity, entrepreneurship, and precarity in creative industries and will be of interest to scholars and policymakers alike.

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