The Government's new creative economy strategy is a major step forward - but does it go far enough?

The Government’s long-awaited strategy paper on the creative economy - Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy - was launched today. It is a landmark in policy-making for the creative sectors and the whole economy, argues BOP Consulting Director Paul Owens. But does it go far enough?

22 February 2008

The clue to the significance of the government’s strategy lies in its title: it’s the 'new economy', stupid!

DCMS, BERR and DIUS have ambitious aims for this strategy. We are not just dealing here with boosting music exports, training games programmers or building new arts centres, though these come into the equation. The ambition is to embed creativity – the capacity to generate new ideas and put them to use – throughout the whole of economic life: from the classroom to the boardroom, from the street to the science lab, from the village green to the city centre.

We have come along way from the publication of the first DCMS Creative Industries Mapping Document ten years ago, with its 13 sector view of the world. This was itself a landmark event, which showed that by using ideas to generate wealth and create jobs, the film, TV, music, design, computer games, publishing and other creative sectors had become some of the fastest growing parts of the UK economy.

Armed with this evidence, sector bodies and economic development agencies across the UK set about targeting creative businesses through existing schemes and a whole new set of support programmes. Networks, training schemes, knowledge transfer, all manner of projects with hugely varying degrees of success have proliferated in every nation and region. In the meantime, the UK became the centre of international attention – not just admired for its distinctive creative output and for its talented people but also for bothering to have an industrial view of these sectors and for spending so much time and money on supporting them. The Mapping Document, and the definitions and methods underpinning it, had themselves become creative exports.

When the DCMS launched the Creative Economy Programme in 2005, it was a welcome opportunity for government and industry to reflect on the legacy of the original mapping documents of 1998 and 2001, and to give new impetus to the UK’s policy on the creative sectors. At first it seemed the programme was going to put the emphasis on industry and growth sectors – a relatively old-fashioned BERR/RDA focus. Instead the thinking has gravitated towards the ‘c’ word: creativity.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is the growing interest in creativity amongst policy-makers and business at large, and the shift in attention from a sector-based view to the overall process of how ideas are generated and then turned into commercially viable products and services. The second is Will Hutton’s argument, described in Staying Ahead: the economic performance of the UK’s creative industries, that ‘expressive value’ is the holy grail of advanced knowledge economies with their increasing numbers of ‘apex’ consumers. The challenge is to nurture and exploit this at all levels of society and the economy.

So Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy is a strategy for ‘creativity’ in the economy with a focus the creative industries. As such, it is a radical departure from the (now tired) policy thinking ushered in by the mapping documents. It is an admirable attempt to turn the joined-up thinking of the Creative Economy programme into joined-up policy-making. It makes the vital links between education, skills, enterprise, innovation, certain aspects of the regulatory environment, civil society, placemaking and the global market. It is focused on the needs of business. It’s clear about who should lead what – very important in a world with hundreds of stakeholders. For all its great ambition, the 26 commitments it puts forward are pragmatic and achievable.

But let us not forget that, unlike 10 years ago, the UK is no longer leading the policy thinking on the creative economy. Many other countries have learned from the experience of the UK and taken the thinking to another level that serves their own ambitious economic growth strategies. A survey of 18 developed and emerging economies undertaken by BOP Consulting last year discovered that 16 have explicit policies relating to the exploitation of their creative assets as part of broader industrial and economic strategies. In most of these countries (Canada, China, India, Finland), the policy thinking is highly sophisticated – and backed up by considerable public and private investment.

Seen in this global competitive context, the Creative Economy Strategy is nowhere near ambitious enough. It lacks a larger future narrative, a big idea. Too many of the proposals are initiatives that are already underway or involve making small improvements to existing supply-side structures. As the Strategy paper itself hints, as global competition increases, we will need more systemic long-term changes to our school curricula, to our business support systems and to the way in which public money is invested in culture. We need a new civil-economic ‘architecture’ for the support of the creative economy built around imaginative demand-side interventions in the market, a balanced regime for protecting intellectual property and a flexible range of instruments for investment and commercialisation.

At least the Creative Economy Strategy is a start. Here at BOP we are already working with our clients to implement some of the proposals of the Strategy. We hope that all of the proposals are put into practice quickly and imaginatively. Then we can all get on with bigger, exciting challenge of designing an environment for the creative economy of the future.