Unexpected Media

Creative Economy Programme

The DCMS is currently engaged in a process of putting together proposals that could form the basis of a green paper on support for creative industries in the UK. I went to a meeting today of the ‘Competition and Intellectual Property Working Group’ at the London Business School - standing in for someone who couldn’t make it. It was a good discussion with some ideas challenging commonly-accepted attitudes to the creative economy.

There is a tendency to criticise the UK’s small creative businesses for not having the ambition or expertise to grow into large or medium-sized enterprises. John Bates argued that this was a false concern and that it wasn’t necessary for companies to get larger in order to become more successful or profitable, particularly in the creative industries. This may not be a major new insight but it does reflect a common confusion about what ‘growth’ means. Creatives are routinely accused of wanting to maintain life-style companies and not having the ambition to grow into proper businesses. This association of growth with size seems to grow from a misunderstanding of how value is created in the creative sector.

The other idea was to propose to government, partly as provocation, that open access has arrived. The law is always going to be playing catch up in trying to protect and enforce copyright, criminalising consumers on a daily basis. Creative professionals in industries whose business models are based on exploiting IP are going to have to accept this sooner or later: the sooner they do so, the sooner they will invent new ways of generating revenue from their IP.

This meeting was, incidentally, my first experience in this country of a US cultural import that should be stoutly resisted: a meeting at 7:30am - an experience made worse by an inadequate supply of coffee cups.