Abstract

It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.

Julian Thomas
The Australian
February 22, 2010 12:00AM

CONFUSION and disarray surround Stephen Conroy's decision to rebate licence fees for commercial television broadcasters.

The decision raises the most basic question that can be asked about government dispensation of any kind: what was this money for?

There are young Australians who are already making a name (and money) for themselves in the latest market for creative content – and it didn’t exist a moment ago. YouTube is a huge repository of amateur content, but it is also rapidly evolving into a site that has legally contracted Hollywood movies and TV shows but is working out ways to share revenues from advertising with gifted and committed amateurs whose creativity attracts a big following.

Can government play a role in assisting Australian creative talent to catch some of dynamism of emerging markets for culture?

Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.

Australian Financial Review

Creativity is today’s ultimate black box a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing or impossible’. He tried to order the field, and constructed a profile of 42 models of creativity which, when combined with assorted variations and typologies, totted up 303 variables!

Faculty Seminar Series

Professor Justin O’Connor, Research Capacity Building Professor Tuesday 28th April 12pm-1pm The Hall (Z2-226) CI Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove

Creative labour: emancipation or honey-trap?

This presentation to NESTA's Measuring the Creative Industries workshop contains a range of slides covering the data collected in CCI's Digital Industries Mapping project.

The production of knowledge has become central to economic life. Competitiveness in the 21st century market place is now characterized by the ability to translate scientific and technological knowledge into innovation. But does this render cultural and social knowledge unimportant?

The creative industries are one of the most important contributors to the UK economy. So it is important that we accurately measure their contribution to economic activity. Doing so can help both policymakers and industry professionals to communicate key concepts, share reliable data and make the case for greater investment. There have been renewed attempts to estimate the true size of the creative economy. The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Greater London Authority (GLA) both published studies in 2007.

In this paper Jason Potts argues that the definition of cultural science depends on the definition of creative industries. The problem, however, is that unlike the definition of evolutionary economics, complexity science and new cultural studies, which are also elements of cultural science, the creative industries suffer multiple non-commensurable definitions. These are reviewed and analytic implications for the definition of cultural science are examined.

Published in Cultural Science, Vol 1, No 1 (2008)

This paper proposes that there have been three iterations of creative industries mapping to date.

A series of 15 fact sheets on employment and businesses characteristics of the creative segments.

This report, prepared for the Perth City Council, shows that in 2006 Metropolitan Perth’s Creative Industry (CI) segments employed almost 40,000 people and contributed $4.6bn to the local economy.

The terms Creative Industries and Creative Digital Industries are now widely used by business and government in similar ways to the more established terms of cultural sector, primary and manufacturing industries.

Attempts to measure the bundle of activities termed the creative industries commenced with the UK¹s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) release in 1998 of the Creative Industries Mapping Study.

The experimental methodologies developed in the Creative Industries National Mapping Project (CINMP) by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation at QUT indicate that previous attempts to measure the significance of the Australian creative production capacity and employment have underestimated their true extent.

This paper documents the initial findings in the search for the macro-scale patterns within the numbers and types of businesses operating within the various segments that make up the Creative industries in Australia.