Freelancer Focus: Innovation

Published as: James Davies, Bethan Jones and Richard Hurford. Media Cymru Freelance Focus: Innovation, (Cardiff: Media Cymru, 2025)

“Innovations… are capable of providing huge benefits to all areas of that production process, but the pursuit of advances in technology for technology’s sake can also have deleterious consequences, particularly on the skill sets of freelancers, responsible for keeping up with the pace of change themselves, without any robust training infrastructure to support them.”

Summary

There are a multitude of interpretations of the concept of ‘innovation’ amongst screen sector freelancers. The concept is not always fully understood, but it is largely interpreted as both a product and a process.

Screen sector freelancers have limited capacity to engage in the development of innovative products and Research and Development (R&D) activity and often have little autonomy to instigate innovative processes working within a project-based working environment.

The introduction of innovative products often facilitates adjustments in workflows, allowing for small-scale, day-to-day innovations in the form of problem solving but freelancers are seldom the innovators themselves, rather the beneficiaries of innovations originating in the tech sector.

The introduction of innovative products and processes can have both intended and unintended consequences, and these consequences are not always positive. Concerns include the lowering of production quality, a shift in the desirable skillsets in the advent of generative AI, issues related to Intellectual Property and the automation of existing roles.

These findings have implications for skills and training for freelancers within the sector, and the need to better equip the region’s freelancers with the absorptive capacity to manage the introduction of such innovations.

A recognition is needed of the possible contribution of the freelance proportion of the TV and Film workforce, both in the Cardiff Capital Region and more widely, as a skilled workforce able to effectively apply innovative products, rather than the source of substantive R&D activity.

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