Abstract
Creative skills, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills and management skills have all been positively associated with firm performance as well as regional growth. But do firms that combine these types of skills in their workforce grow more quickly than those that do not? We compare the impact of STEM, creative and management skills on their own, and in various combinations, on turnover growth. We use a longitudinal dataset of UK firms over the period 2008–2014 with lagged turnover data to explore whether the combination of skills used by a firm impacts its future turnover growth. Using fixed-effect panel and pooled OLS models, we find that the performance benefits associated with both STEM and creative skills materialize when they are combined with each other or with management skills rather than when they are deployed on their own.
Highlights
This paper explores the impact of creative, technical and management workforce skills, and their combinations, on firm growth
While we find limited effects on performance when we consider creative or STEM skills when deployed on their own, we find that the performance benefits associated with both STEM and creative skills are only revealed when used in combination with each other, with management skills, or with the combination of all three types of skills together
Our main research question asks whether use of STEM, creative and management skills and all their possible combinations are associated with a higher firm performance, measured by sales growth
Summary
This paper explores the impact of creative, technical and management workforce skills, and their combinations, on firm growth. While debates on STEM, creative and management skills remained separate for some time, the growing realisation that there may be complementary effects between these skills led them to increasingly converge over recent years This has manifested in the rise of a movement advocating to add arts to STEM education, resulting in ‘STEAM’—science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics—curricula (Daugherty 2013), which has coincided with growing evidence about the interactive effects of STEM and creative occupations at the regional level (Brunow et al 2018). This paper takes the final approach, exploring the effect of combinations of skills on firms’ turnover growth Such approaches are empirically challenging in that these endogenous factors have only limited explanatory power over firm performance in comparison with the effectively random ‘inevitable trading vicissitudes’ involved in running a business (Coad et al 2013).
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