Networking bonanza: NottTuesday, Nottingham Twestival, TigerSpike and Nottingham Creative Business Awards

This week I’ve been networking more in the physical rather than online world, though with some interesting dalliances in-between where online networks facilitate “third city” interaction in the real world. With three networking events in one week in Nottingham, it really does seem like the digital and creative scene in Nottingham is starting to emerge splenderous from its slumbering cocoon – these are exciting times!

Nott Tuesday 10-02-09

Tuesday saw the inaugural launch of Nott Tuesday, a new network for Nottingham’s high tech professionals which saw a packed room of about 50 IT and digital types (90 percent male) descend on The Cape bar for a structured evening of presentation and networking. I think I tracked this down from looking at new groups my LinkedIn contacts had joined that week.

Enthusiastically established and curated by Adam from Essendex, the speaker was Ewan McLeod from Mobile Industry Review who gave a fascinating talk on how blogging and social network grew his business. From his frustration trying to promote a previous business offering SMS to screen display to New Media Age, the main press of the time, Ewan started a blog on SMS news using the simple and classic blogging technique of signing up to Google Alerts and a £5 month Typepad account, aggregating content in a simple 10-minute-a-day round-up.

Within weeks he was the top ranking site for the search term ‘SMS news’ and soon he had an audience, which with hundreds of thousands of page views rapidly exceeded the 10,000 readership of New Media Age. When he started excerting his extreme opinion on Vodafone (in a hand shaking ‘dare I press publish?’ move) he realised he had an opinion people wanted to here, which echoes my own blogging experiences of gaining more reaction to opinion than reportage. With web 2.0 forms of publishing, you can become the press as easily as you can try and chase the tails of them.

Today, Ewan dam used the example of attracting the attention of the Government’s Minister for Information through using Twitter Search to find tweets relevant to his expertise, and responding in Twitter’s unique 140 character format to the Minister’s “Google, good or evil?’ post. Soon they were in dialogue, in a way unimaginable in either a traditional offline, longer-form (like letters or even email) or more formal style of conversion. Adam responded with knowledge and ideas to the Information Minister’s specific need to information right then.

Ewan’s talk was inspiring and made me realise I should utilise Twitter search more for potential sourcing of clients and like-minded.

The crowd at Nott Tuesday was a nice mix of digital start-ups, academics, games people, IT consultants and more and I feel really inspired by the possibilities of the new networks and events self-initiating within Nottingham at the moment (which makes my job many times easier!)

AMC/ TigerSpike launch 11-02-09

Way down in that extreme weather beacon of London village, I was invited to an event which celebrated something almost heart-warming in the present financial apocalyptic gloom: the launch of a new London office for Sydney and New York based TigerSpike, whose business has grown exponentially at 1000% per year.

TigerSpike specialise in mobile technologies and commamunications, and have coined the term ‘Personal Media’ - their term to describe person-to-person communications which include talking, phone, social media and web – and a perfect way of defining for the mobile comms solution. Their vision is to become a ‘platform as a service’ like the IBM for Personal Media.

Great thinking and technological innovation come through TigerSpike’s internal Innovation Lab model using a process called RIGOUR (Research, Identify, Generate, Opportunistic, Utilisation, Re-invest) which seems like an exciting formal innovation process to bring to a UK digital technology company. Definitely ones to watch.

Thanks to Xavier Adam from the AMC group for organising a splendid lunch and a very interesting collection of the city’s mobile and digital types there too, and no thanks for a terrible picture of me at the lunch!

Twestival Nottingham 12-02-09

Back in Hood town, Nottingham Twestival was a very different affair; Nottingham came to the Twitter table with late notice to set up a Twestival to join the 200+ other global cities in one simultaneous evening event for charity celebrating those brought together through the social medium of Twitter.  The global reports were impressive – the 700 person artsfest of London Twestival looked mighty fun, I was sorry to miss the 200+ attendees of Brum Twestival where many of my Twitter comrades are.

Nottingham was a more modest collection of 20 or so social media freaks – I was suprised at our diversity and motives – several PR, digital media and social media professionals but also several politicians and a few early adopters from other walks of life – and a few virtual participants joining in via ‘Tweets’ on Twitter.  If you’re not already sold on the instant connectivity of Twitter, the idea of coming together over a web platform is probably more barking that tweeting , but if you like the serendipity of how communities share knowledge then you just might find it addictive, and if you do I’d urge you to follow me on Twitter here.

I had a range of very different conversations – from using social media for business, to the pitfalls of beer festivals, to Nottingham’s tawdry legacy of Robin Hood. There’s definitely a ‘vibe’ to the ’share and share alike’ Twitter community that allows conversations between people from different professional and backgrounds to intermingle.

I’ve been warmed lately by the sheer volume of ‘non geeks’ signing up and how conversation are shaping more widely to augment the community.  The number of novice Twitterers, even at the Nottingham Twestival, shows we have some way to come as a social media connecting business community to compete with the chaps in Birmingham and beyond – but now is the right time for us to get inter-connected.

In the bar we had a screen displaying Twitter feeds from our own event, alongside posts from the rest of the Twestivals.  The beauty of Twitter is that you can easily aggregate information by tagging your posts with terms like #nottstwestival.  Here’s a lowdown of most of our collective conversations via Twitter, and you can follow some recap on action at the NottsTwestival Twitter feed.  Thanks to Martin for splendidly organising it all – we did raise £210 for charity (and I won a very bizarre DVD in a raffle that I can only describe as a strange am-dram Biblical version of Alan Bennett which will certainly be making it’s way to a charity shop near you soon. Double donation

Nottingham Creative Business Awards Presentation 16-02-09

And finally, a more formal wine, canapes and presentation do c/o Nottingham Trent University where winners of their 2008 Creative Business Awards presented their wares, with some corporate vid style big-up for the 2009 awards.

Martin Knox talked about how the city is ready to come out of its cocoon and the economy means everything is up for grabs for creatives.  That may be true, but I wonder whether the cash-strapped City Council and other private business will fund the awards in 09.  I’ve never been one for expensive penguin-suited awards ceremonies being a thorough digital type (the mantra: you get more for less online) but I do see their place in the visual creative industries and anything that openly celebrates the creative scene of the city is good news.

Many award winners werethe successful and predictable – I’m curious about University of Nottingham winning the digital award (Nott’s digerati get it sorted!), although their mad scientist Periodic Table videos on YouTube is, admitedly, quite funky in a “Look around you” way.  And Hetain Patel’s business of the year was a brave step for a one-man performance art canvas.

So despite the financial apocalypse gloom, I do believe the future for Nottingham creative sector is looking pink, if not rosy.  And this paves the way for an announcement from me very soon on a new digital project to take Nottingham’s creatives to the next stage of connectivity.

Nottingham – World Design Capital 2012?

I went to a small shindig last night at ChinaChina restaurant organised by Nottingham Ambassadors (City Council) and Invest in Nottingham, to raise profile for the city (in his introduction Simon Green, the city’s council’s Director of Sustainable Development was to keen to point out this was the whole of Nottingham and it’s professional community, not just his local authority’s boundaries) in a bid to become the next city of World Design Capital, which in 2008 is currently Turin.

Mr Green solicited our answers on a postcard – but scant was revealed at this stage of what emphasis the city’s bid would take – or indeed what the benefits would be to us as business owners and practitioners (or will we, like the City of Culture bid, be in position to leverage in more European cash?).

Further probing on the World Design Capital website says the award is for:

“The vision of the World Design Capital project is to promote and encourage the use of design to further the social, economic and cultural development of the world’s cities.

The designation provides a distinctive opportunity for the selected city to showcase their accomplishments in attracting and promoting creative industries, as well as demonstrate how government and industry work in concert with educational institutions, designers and its citizens to revitalise and reinveint the urban environment.“

A laudable aim, but initially my thoughts were:

1. What design industry?

2. Is the city actually offering any systematic, public support to the design sector – or just riding PR off the back of its well-coutured coat tails?

Spot the cynical consultant.  Then after some reflection, and a chat with the lovely Debbie Bryan, a designer of exquisite knit wear and booches and resident of creative incubator The Hive, Nottingham is indeed brimming with design success stories – from pioneering computer games developers, great branding, web and design agencies of national calibre (like Souk Digital and Studio Output), a raft of homeware designers and most significantly the fashion industry, put on the map by local guru Mr Paul Smith – who says publicly he is backing the bid alongside other bid brand Speedo -  now spinning off a clutch of gifted textiles, fashion and designer-maker names – many graduates from the great design courses at Nottingham Trent University.

Indeed, gatecrashing the fasionista club RSViP night after, quite a show of quality design people were showcasing there work in fashion, homeware and art.

Yet for me the buck stops at how the city (and region) is supporting and promoting its creative and design sector – and thus I fail to see how Nottingham could make a shortlist, despite a talent pool up with the best of England’s bigger cities.

As a starter-for-ten in the nearby, not especially design noteworthy Birmingham, the city supports the Plus design festival and Rhubarb Rhubarb international photography exhibition, alongside newer initiatives like Hello Digital digital film and media showcase. Not to mention Fused mag’s affordable art markets at the Custard Factory and a plethora of media, craft and arts events and exhibitions in between.  Many are run commercially or altruistically – yet many are given some seed (or bush-like in some cases) finance or marketing clout from public institutes like Business Link, Arts Council, Marketing Birmingham and Birmingham City Council.

The Council’s official press release on the city’s bid state’s we need to consider several areas for the bid, including: our proposed programme of events, design in schools, regeneration and architecture.  This seems quite geared towards architecture and the built environment to me, and as such perhaps Nottingham has developing some interesting work here in recent years.

Someone recently commented to me that Nottingham city officials expects the creative industries to happen without investing in it.  Big capital bids like developing Broadway cinema, New Art Exchange and Nottingham Contemporary art gallery run contrary to this, but from my own experience  of working in creative regeneration, projects need to be about much more than buildings and institutes, revenues need to flow through to support the fine grain of the creative city – which includes public spaces, networks, events, showcases, training and business support – either through European funding, regional funding, local funding from business rates or capital-turned-into-revenue endowments like the Bristol+ Creative Industries endowement fund I helped to set up with Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre in 2007 (though I’m disappointed that for a digital insitute they seem to be suprisingly unaccountable online as to how the £300K annual revenue is being spent or can be accessed – any further heads-up on the latest greatly received in comments).

And in this respect I fear Nottingham is many furlongs behind other English, let alone European cities.  However, I do think events like this are important in starting to galavanise the design community – in all its depths, shapes and sizes – and wider creative business sector to discuss our own strengths, opportunities and maybe do something about promoting it ourselves.

And who knows, perhaps Nottingham Council will put their money where their mouth is and commit to a significant event or series of activities to promote local alongside international design talent and start to put Nottingham on the international map for design – and with it attracting some very necessary tourism and inward investment.

What do you think are our odds for success?

Ideas from thin air at NESTA Innovation Edge

On 20th May I went to NESTA’s Innovation Edge, a free one day conference at London’s South Bank Centre where the good and the great of innovation-led entrepreneurs, technologists, policy hucksters and futorologists (many sporting wide-heavy rimmed glasses, like myself) gathered en masse (3,000, exactly) to conflab on the broad subject of ideas in the UK – a temporary ideopolis, if you will. This was the largest ever event held by NESTA, the state-funded endowment for science, technology and the arts (three-quarters funding quango, quarter fresh thinking).

Here’s a few highlights alone because I only caught half the event and it’s been covered in detail elsewhere and aggregated by NESTA. Indeed, this was an event with social media at the heart where Twittering was actively encouraged by participants and fed into the discussion. See the Innovation Edge stream of tweets.

A few thoughts on what I saw:

Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof (describing himself as ‘not small and fat like Bono’. Good to see the Oirish rock dinosaurs are as bitchy as members of Girls Aloud) tells us, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw’s description of ‘unreasonable men’, that an innovator “persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the innovator.”

Other cutting-edge revelations from the man who saved the world:

• “Ideas are like a-holes. Everyone’s got one”.
• Consumerism is not king: world resources are limited, so innovation entrepreneurs are needed more than ever, in particular social entrepreneurs (like Muhammad Yunus and micro-finance for better ploughs in Bangladesh) Yet we are losing the ability to celebrate social entrepreneurs – it’s all about he who makes the most money, not the most radical change. Examples include e-credits by mobile phone to buy meat from a far away village, to guarantee food will be there instead of wasting a day’s travel.
• The English are proud of their eccentricity – but also proud that they don’t make any money from their inventions (like Tim Berners-Lee)? Yet there is an underlining fear of failure whish is destroying innovation.
• The future is about co-operation not competition – it’s Facebook, Open Source and the NHS. Knowledge and connectivity will liberate the world from politics and poverty – Harvard geeks and ubiquitous computing spread the knowledge which ended the Cold War.

Interesting ideas and inspired delivery – and of course Sir Bob can get away with saying (and expleting) what the rest of us in need of a pay cheque cannot. But not really sure if he had anything new to say about innovation, and I glazed when he starts banging on about famine, politics and the like (knowing full well he’d be taking tea backstage with PM Brown).

From the keynote panel:

• Not everyone needs to be an entrepreneur – we need managers and follower to.
• Children learn in different ways now -a 6-year-old published a white paper on Barbie using Google.
• Throw out the ancient conflict between East (China, India) and West – come together to tackle the big global issues of health and climate change. Power blocks can become trading blocks.
• Developing world citizens are honest in managing investment, not handouts – Kiva, lending to entrepreneurs in the developing world, has a 98% payout rate.
• What can the Prime Minister do? Not let the rules of the past, the 19th century way we still do business, rule business today. Leading nicely to…

Gordon Brown

As expected, a lot of rhetoric and hot air a la Creative Economy. ‘We want to be the innovation nation, not just now but in the future’. ‘UK will shine because of our creative ideas’. etc. BUT…

A much underestimated man, Brown’s speach, un-scripted and seemingly off the cuff, was filled with humour, anecdotes and a genuine enthusiasm for the work of UK’s innovators. He recalled his pre-parliament career as a university lecturer – and certainly exhibited qualities of enthusiasm, dedication and learning – ‘which you have to leave at the door for a career in politics.’ I couldn’t help wondering if he’d be secretly happier in the hallowed corridors of Higher Education than ruling the country. Inspired but without substence.

Seminar: Are Online Social Networks the New Cities?

Delving further into the realm of a digital ideopolis with Michael Birch (CEO of Bebo, just to put you in the picture, and because these kind of events do kinda drag after lunch, he looks lots like Chemical Tom of Chemical Brothers), Richard Leese (Chief Exec of Manchester City Council, looks like Nick Hewer from The Apprentice), John Gisby (Channel 4 New Media, looks like Dom Jolly of Trigger Happy TV) and curator by acclaimed author of ‘the New Entrepreneurs’ Charles Leadbetter (looks like just about every other male at the conference).

Birch: Bebo is modelled on what makes a city great – but diverse like London, not modelled like Milton Keynes. Social Networks are like a bar, they can be brilliantly designed, but if they’re not populated they won’t do business. ‘Early dopters’ are like the alcoholics waiting at the door for the bar to open.
Leese: Manchester has to drive itself forward – it could easily become the first post-industrial city of decline as in times before.

Panel and audience discussion:

• Sue Thomas (De Montfort University) describes social media as ‘the dissolution of the monasteries’. Interuption is a part of digital, modern life. Yet it’s not always atruistic, it can be used for negative political or social gain e.g. cyber bullying.
• We wouldn’t put so much public money into TV if we were starting from a clean slate; Channel 4 Innovation4Public starts to re-dress the digital balance.
• Social networks are like online version of coffee shops – nodes of social interaction points. Digital oils the wheels of social interaction. Can we establish a digital bothy - a Scottish moutain refuge where serendipity, not shared niche interests or offline connections, can connect people together in new, unexpected ways?
• Schools need to be more web-based, but a straw poll showed a small majority of attendees think the teacher/pupil relationship for learning will still be the core of future education, not replaced by an online model.
• Is digital media fragmenting the family? Strangely, in days gone by we gathered together in the living room in front of the TV – but today everyone is on their computers in their own room online.

Best from the rest:

The ever eloquent James Heartfield pours cold water on the Davos-like event atmosphere cast by Gordon Brown c/o Spiked Online.

Nick Booth @ Podnosh captures some of the Twittering.

And a proper-proper review c/o Claudine Beaumont @ The Telegraph on Tim Berners-Lee who describes the internet and its users as like a teenager with growing pains.

In summary:

A good day full of somewhat lively discussion and networking. Innovation Edge #2 would be a ‘must be there’ event. However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and it did feel like the lack of any commercial or other sponsors made the event very much about selling NESTA’s new agenda and self-promoting its own greatness with the best known speakers money can buy. Does it skew the balance for commercial events? Probably not, but next time some commercial input – or even opportunities for open space or small user-generated discussions, would be welcome. The IQ of the room must equal a billion – enough brainwaves to raise the roof and do some serious positive damage if harnessed in the right way.

Creative Clusters London Reviewed

Creative Clusters, Nov 12th to 14th 2007, London

Creative Clusters is the annual shindig of global cultural and creative policy makers. It’s where the good and the great of critical thinking, research, policy and exponents of hot air in the sector get together to sing glorious the unrestrained growth of global creative industries, and ask where it’s all going.

I did originally question ‘why London?’. Newcastle/Gateshead in 2006 was great to see world-class regeneration in action, but we all know London (and some of us regional types also question why London needs creative industries investment, given that it inevitably sucks in the best of the regions we spend so much time and money nurturing. More on that later). Or do we know London? I actually saw some interesting new aspects of the city – Rich Mix in Shoreditch, a sort of multi-cultural cinema venue, was a relaxed place for Day 2, and BFI/South Bank was a pretty spectacular place for day 1.

A tour of Oxford Street/Soho on day 3 also made me think about the unique problems of central London – land rents, traffic, lack of expansion, fragmented property ownership – but also the same problems, trying to ‘upgrade’ retail, build in creativity and persuade the best to stay.

As always, far too much going on and Simon Evans, Conference Director is doing his ‘trendy vicar’ (his words) bit to hold the many threads together. This year’s themes were The Creative Quarter, Creative Economy, World Creative Hubs and Creative Crowd. Although you can add the word creative to just about anything nowadays. Four sessions to choose from meant lots of missing out, as did an epic hangover (c/o guys from Inspiral, cheers, this is turning out to be an annual binge!).

Split venues on day 3 (Soho and Kensington) not great from a networking point of view – in fact Day 3 never seems worth sticking around for. Still, maybe you can’t get too much of a good thing. And the conference handbook gives you an overview of what you’ve missed (or another useful doorstopper).

My highlights:

- Kevin Spacey bares all and gets back to basics about the power of theatre and getting bums on seats. (probably a misleading juxtaposition of Kevin Spacey, bares all, and bums there – sorry ladies!)

- Jude Kelly takes the debate up a gear and asks when we will stop banging on about growth and economic impact and take responsibility for reinvesting in nurturing creativity and the arts.

- A Daily Mail hack wiping the floor with the outgoing Arts Council CEO on the lies, lies and damn statistics that is Labour’s creative industries policy.

- Re-emphasising the role of creative brokers and insightful intermediaries that help industry take control of public policy.

- Are creative cities in danger of becoming clone towns?

- Money can’t buy you creativity? Think again – Abu Dhabi’s $2.7 billion “Happiness Island” cultural development includes the Middle East’s Guggenheim and Louvre.

My footlights:

- Creative Economy Green Paper. Now merely a policy document. In the post with your Christmas card. Or maybe New Year. Or Valentine’s. Worth waiting for?

- Will Hutton, DCMS and London dragging us back down to mere growth numbers, economics (but are they even believable?), but we wonder if what’s good for London is good for the UK.

- A statistician’s playpen. Too many numbers. 10101000100. We. Cannot. Take. Them. All In.

- The division between arts/culture and commercial/economic creative industries still runs too deep.

- Ken Livingstone’s ‘cultural advisor’ saying she’s ‘concerned’ about BBC moving jobs to Manchester and how London will suffer (claws bared from the regions).

- Zhandra Rhodes – dressed in some kind of metallic outfit that Klaus Nomi rejected. Great speech (‘did I forget anything, luv?’) followed by middle age men ogling scantily dressed models. All in the name of fashion, dahhling.

- The circus entertainment. What was that woman with the snakes doing?! I’ve never seen an audience watching with such intense concentration, wondering ‘is this bad or bloody awful?’

My daily highlights:

12 Nov, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Keynote speaker: Jude Kelly, Director of South Bank Centre

Jude Kelly asks: Is our approach to the creative industries sustainable? In this age of globalisation, are the creative industries feeding excessive consumerism and undervaluing the role of ideas?

The saint of creativity is Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. Contrary to the popular vision, creativity rejects ego and creates cohesion. Anarchy is self-centred.

We must take collective responsibility for the good and the bad – for slavery, for winning the World Cup – and for creative regeneration.

There is selfishness in the UK succeeding globally in the creative industries – there is too much “I want more – on my own terms”. Both good and social injustice is happening as a result of the UK creative industries (e.g. encouraging rampant consumerism). We must take responsibility for giving back more if we are doing so well – returning economic gains back into regenerating the arts and creativity.

Keynote speaker: Charles Landry, The Creative City

Creativity is like a rash.

Everyone is now in the creativity game. Creativity has become a mantra of our age endowed almost exclusively with positive virtues. At the last count, over 80 cities called themselves creative: from Creative London to Manchester, from Toronto to Vancouver to Cincinnati or Tampa Bay.

Of the top 25 global cities (London being the only one in UK), several are city states – Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong. Perhaps the success of a creative city is in its containment rather than sprawl?

Is creativity an industry – or just people doing creative things?

Has New York reached its creative capacity? Both land and property prices and political change mean the creatives are moving out. Is Chicago now more imaginative and edgy?

High quality artists give a quality of thinking and a quality perception to the creative city – yet arts is a journey with an unclear destination.

Beware of reading too much into data – clusters can have strange patterns – Love Hotels are clustered next to cemeteries – re-birth and death entwined?

Include science as part of creativity – Florida’s “Creative Class” account for a third of all USA workers. Today’s classic was yesterday’s innovation e.g. Eiffel Tower.

Government’s risk policy removes both risk and opportunity. A creative city is a jazz jam session more than a symphony – we all need equality and an opportunity to perform.

We need to reduce the creative bureaucracy, away from rules and regulations to a social, flexible model – less risk and more partnerships, participation and enablers.

We need to combine the different insights of the opposing partners, e.g. economic development versus the arts. Think of the software of the city as well as the hardware – take a holistic view.

‘Chaos’ and ‘Pain’ are two key international graffiti tags. The creative city is a contradiction – Istanbul has mannequin shops next to mosques.

Cities measures of success:

1. Innovation and creativity
2. Networks and connectivity

The creative city is not a factory but a centre for enquiry. Avoid clone cities – always think – ‘what can we only do here?’

Art, Science, Industry Session – BFI

Simon Stevens, Enable Enterprises

Simon has cerebral palsy, but in Second Life he’s a gifted entrepreneur, providing disability consultancy services and running a nightclub for the disabled. And in Second Life, like the real world, he’s in a wheelchair.

There are more wheelchairs in Second Life than in the real world. There are difficulties here too for users:

- Many questions and assumptions, hostile reactions from users – ‘Why are you in a wheelchair?’

- Accessibility of Second Life software

- Accessing buildings and the environment in a wheelchair. Possible need for anti-discrimination legislation in constructing the Second Life environment?

Second Life is not what it is yet, but it presents an opportunity for things to come. Marginalised people can take centre stage, but how can this democratisation translate back into the real world?

Terry Trickett, Trickett Associates, Advisor to the Wellcome Trust

Terry described four Sci-Art projects funded by Wellcome Trust, all of which are starting to have research or commercial applications:

- Modified photographs of phantom limbs of amputees

- Artworks made of decomposing grasses (can computerise traditional plant research)

- Researching a painter’s hand-to-eye co-ordination

- Kinetica interactive art – Millie the Neural Net Starfish (application in hotels, nightclubs, screensavers)

Sci-Art is cross-disciplinary – mixing people from diverse disciplines to enrich each other’s thinking and research. It holds up a mirror to the future. Sci-Art ideas may be as powerful as the industrial revolution.

Arantxa Mendiharat, Disonancias

The Disonancias project, in San Sebastian, Spain, brought research companies into contact with international artists to create new products or innovation processes. It encouraged deviations and dissonances away from regular thought. Issues included difficulties in understanding and commercialising IP. Learning from the programme – many findings are commercially sensitive (a valid means of public investment?). Now, artists are emerging from their ivory tower, embedding in the real world, and learning from it.

The Artists as Property Developer, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Mubarak al Muhairi, Abu Dhabi, Tourism Development

A presentation about Saadiyat (“Happiness Island”), Abu Dhabi’s landmark $2.7 billion 670 acre cultural district with infrastructure designed by world’s leading brands and architects: Guggenheim Abu Dhabi designed by Frank Gehry, Louvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel and a performing arts centre by Zaha Hadid alongside luxury hotels, 150,000 residents and ten causeways connecting it to the mainland. It will attract an estimated 500,000 visitors. The development will ripple to provide economic opportunities and creative skills to those in neighbouring communities. High spend, high impact. Who says money can’t buy in creativity?

Eddie Berg, BFI

Changing his presentation from UK’s under-activity in film to a more personalised dialect about cultural cities, Berg discussed his view of the changing face of Liverpool from the first day of its Cultural City status. FACT (Liverpool’s digital media centre he was formerly the director of) was embedded as a local connection in the community, and a long time in gestation. The new BFI film centre aims to provide an openness, café culture, as part of a £25 million development and to be fit for the digital age when film-making is no longer the preserve of the privileged.

Dawn Austwick, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation

A discussion of the development of a number of UK modern cultural landmarks and institutes:

- Millennium Bridge, Southwark – official were at one point ‘afraid’ of people from Southwark “crossing over” the bridge to enter the city and St Paul’s.

- Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, South Bank – would it have faired so well without the rest of the South Bank regeneration? It succeeds not only in restoration but in innovation – it is a platform for new playwrights.

- Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art (MIMA) – the art press said you can’t translate magnificent architecture into alien territory. But it succeeded – there is a relationship between place and content.

- Baltic/Sage, Gateshead – a platform for the community with challenging programming within the community and education. North East’s cultural regeneration enabled by Peter Davies, a serving Arts Council Officer – the small can influence the large.

- Whitechapel Art Gallery – established in 1901 to bring high quality arts to East Londoners. Never part of regeneration, but community’s cultural enrichment. Today, it’s still part of the cutting-edge – the first gallery in UK to show Rothko.

- Arcola Theatre, Dalston – serves and entertains the local community, e.g. Turkish and Kurdish drama group, Pay What You Can nights. Rather than a regenerator itself, it may be regenerated by new transport links to Hackney, which may in turn give sustainability to the theatre.

Success lies in the right people at the right time with the right attitude and inspired leaders – Southwark County Council underwrote the purchase of Tate Modern site to make it happen there and then.

But…

Art as regeneration – when did modern art become so safe and dull?

Arts organisations are obsessed with their buildings – the Lottery exacerbates this.

The future matrix for arts: a higher volume of smaller public and cultural spaces suitable for local or specialist communities.

Micro-communities (e.g. Facebook groups) creates a dichotomy with the need for large scale gatherings (e.g. Glastonbury) – Bristol’s ‘Cube’ Cinema versus Odeon or BFI.

When the 19th century industrialists had earned their fortunes, they turned their money and time to social responsibilities e.g. model villages and communities like Saltaire and Bournville. How does this responsibility translate into the 21st century?

Creative City Regions, Purcell Rooms

My session, investigating creative regions outside the capitals (or the obvious) was an interesting sandwich of Sweden, Philadelphia and Bristol.

Anders Sjostedt, Swedish Experience Industries

The ‘experience industry’ is used in Sweden as a collective label for practitioners with a creative approach – it includes the creative industries, along with tourism and gastronomy. This ‘experience industry’ accounts for five percent of Swedish GDP.

Anders gave a typically laid-back, Nordic overview of his approach by putting policy into the hands of business – not a top-down model of national policy with regional branches but creating policy from what is already happening.

The approach is called F.U.N.K - an intriguing Swedish acronym: research, education, business, culture – all needing to be interlinked. Top down policies are boring! FUNK stems from the talent/entrepreneur, making it viral – effective and cheaper. It’s low budget: 1.3 million euros for eight regional hubs, but with lots of activity.

The method was expanded into the main regions: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo. But there are gaps on the map – many parts of country not engaged as some industries lack activity.

National strategies need regional approaches, but regional strategies need national ambition to avoid becoming provincial. Give the regions responsibility for key strands specific to their specialisms and they will rise to the international challenge.

The creative industries are knowledge-intensive, constantly changing and depend on the arts for innovative, non-commercial input. We need neutral agents to bring together research, education, business and culture.

Kelly Lee, Innovation Philadelphia

- At the other side of the world, Innovation Philadelphia, working with both creative and knowledge/design industries (e.g. engineering, product design) in the Philadelphia state region, carried out a mapping of their ‘regional assets’ to identify and demystify what their key strengths were.

Linking for-profit and non-profit organisations, they formed a ‘round table’ of 62 leaders with one common strategy, to try and identify the gaps e.g. employers who have more jobs than the talent to fill it, and recognising that more art school graduates start their own business than business school grads.

Personally, the idea of trying to get 62 people to agree on anything – particularly with a whack of the heavy hand of the public sector – requires nerves of steel, moral courage, and utter compromise and dilution. But maybe it can work in Philly more than the English provinces, and they can create a collective altruism.

Susi O’Neill, South West Regional Development Agency

Then me. The last time I stood on the Purcell Rooms stage was for John Peel’s Meltdown in 1998 with a post-rock industrial ensemble. I discussed South West RDA’s investment in Watershed Media Centre to create an endowment fund to benefit creative businesses in the city for the next 112 years (a real investment of up to £50 million). More on that here.

There was even a charming write up in Design Week, name-checking me next to Jude Kelly and Charles Landry (The fame! Oh for lazy journalism!). And also an interview with me in the less celebrated Exeter Echo talking about creative investment in South West England.

Interestingly, although we all represented very different parts of the western world, our approaches had two similarities:

- Putting industry in the driving seat – letting initiatives become less top-down and more bottom-up and seeing what happens.

- The need for intermediaries – ‘honest brokers’, creative connectors who can link the economic or public sector with the arts or creatives – the need is more acute now than ever before.

Keynote speaker: Kevin Spacey

As the ladies in the house swooned, we learnt that other than Hollywood housewife’s choice, Kevin Spacey is also the artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in London (doh! Cultural ignoramus!) . Spacey’s talk was easily the most inspiring and honest of the week – an in depth discussion of how Spacey’s team transformed the theatre from cultural ivory tower to an intrinsic part of the community.

He described how his career was developed by those who took a chance on him – producers, directors and writers. He got his break doing Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park, New York, playing several bit parts including a rock. But his secret passion since his teenage years was to open a theatre.

He reminds us:

- The classics of yesterday were once new works

- To develop talent involves encouraging the risk to forge an original identity

- Film is a director’s medium, but theatre is the actor’s medium

Old Vic has done a lot of outreach, getting 26,000 young people and 3,000 from local community through its doors. Old Vic, New Voices project led to 45 productions at Edinburgh.

The Old Vic has no public subsidy at all, relying on sponsors and philanthropy. Spacey’s links and industry contacts (not to mention his celebrity status) have bought favours in terms of donors and relationships – American Associates is a new writing co-production between the Old Vic and Broadway, and they are establishing a trans-Atlantic company with Sam Mendes, playing a double bill in USA and Old Vic.

A survey of people living adjacent to Old Vic (based on the request of Spacey to the Education Manager go door-knocking) showed 98% had never been into the theatre. He set out to show it was not an island just for the rich in this rough estate.

(Cosby Show moment..)

- When asked why he wanted to take on this role, Spacey spoke of the need to ‘send the elevator back down’, as Jack Lemon once advised him to do. If you’ve succeeded – challenge yourself to do something outside your comfort zone.

- Often, good ideas get throw over the wall.

- A negative attitude is too easy and achieves little.

- But…it doesn’t matter what floor you’re on, you can always ‘send the elevator back down’.

Leadership qualities:

- Don’t be too content – and don’t take your foot off the gas.

- Bring people together, and chose the right elements.

Spacey believes the English are too shy about fundraising and asking for money.

There isn’t a digital response to theatre – people have to go to the theatre to appreciate it, but young people shouldn’t be in the heavens but at the front of the stalls – youth and zeal also spurs the actors on!

Inspiring stuff, but we couldn’t help questioning afterwards (during a bizarre fashion show with Zhandra Rhodes), that Spacey’s celebrity status may buy Old Vic more than any mere ordinary arts leader, and when he goes, will also the generous patrons? I was just plain confused. I thought George Clooney was doing the keynote, and thought he looked very different in E.R

Creative Clusters, Tuesday 13th November, Rich Mix, East London

DCMS: Creative Economy

The moment all of us happy folks in RDA land have been salivating for…
But sadly, not worth the wait.

Brian Leonard, Head of Industry at DCMS, spoke about the ‘long journey’, three years so far from its inception, of the Creative Economy Programme. Now at destination: station shed. No longer a Green Paper (with potential for change to white, i.e. legislative change) and now a policy document. Worth the wait? Well, maybe it was all about the journey – the relationships and the dialogue.

The Programme emphasised the special relationship between infrastructure and the creative industries, and how infrastructure nurtures talent. By infrastructure we mean ‘stuff’ – buildings, institutes, public places and facilities e.g. Tate Modern, Watershed or Workstation. Infrastructure needs to be useful for youth and talent development.

There will be a cross-departmental ‘cradle to grave’ approach with schools, families, education, business to new creative approaches. But government is risk averse to collaborating inter-department. There is a mooted rumour of a major event.

When asked what he thought, Brian Leonard responded: ‘my opinion is not important’ i.e. ‘I couldn’t possible comment’. The ever-devout civil servant.

Will Hutton, The Work Foundation

Will Hutton, the dour author of ‘Staying Ahead’ (thought to be ‘off’ creative industries after a long tenure writing the paper), said he was originally commissioned to write a “State We’re In” for the creative sector.

The creative economy tries to show the links between all 13 sub-sectors and their relationships. UNESCO states the UK is the world’s biggest cultural exporter, and the knowledge economy employs 45% of UK’s workforce.

Hutton’s approach as a non-fiction author is to link the real and fictitious strands of history, philosophy, heritage and economics – a collaboration of serendipity, not just focused on all things creative. Perhaps there are parallels here with how the creative sector needs to integrate with the rest of the cultural sector and the wider economy?

Creative industries’ IP derives from copyright – not from patents but from a clear blue sky. But this creates a higher uncertainty in creative than other industries. The sector need to learn to manage this uncertainty and risk – and learn how to exploit the potential and successful parts of each businesses portfolio.

Creative Commons increases the flow of creativity – but there needs to be a balance between Creative Commons and copyright in the digital age, as there has been in the pre-digital age.

The blogosphere allows for too much free comment and hiding behind anonymity. There is no comeback and it can breed prejudice and extreme views.

Other sectors want to be part of the creative industries: ceramics, engineering, financial services. They have their noses pressed to the glass looking in (or, cynically, are they sniffing out the subsidies?)

There is a need to ‘crowd in’ creativity into design and other sectors.

But the language is moving away from subsidy to investment across the sector.

Creative regeneration needs to:

- Delight residents

- Create jobs (creative industries are good at doing this)

- Be stimulating and exciting

- Build in creativity to all public infrastructure investment e.g. good design

But cities don’t know how to do it with a unique approach (echoing Charles Landry’s idea of ‘clone cities’). There are 46 medium-size cities and eight core cities in the UK. They all need to have a good art college and good residential accommodation to grow as creative places.

But…there are problems for the creative sector:

- Arethe terms of trade fair for the many small players?

- Are we too white, too middle class – as Greg Dyke once said of the BBC?

John Sorrell, Cabe

Creative industries are new – only defined in 1998. Yet the sector is now singing the praises of ministers with non-cultural/creative portfolios e.g. Blair, Brown and Darling.

The sector is typically more working class and less formally qualified, an artisan sphere (not born out by the numbers of graduates in film, TV and software - the most graduate rich of all industries) who find it harder to speak up to government.

Creative diplomacy could be a way of creating a dialogue between nations.

Discussion:

Creative has not had its fair share of the pie?

- £800 million invested in new apprenticeships – none for creative sector

- Enterprise Capital – some investment, but mainly new media

As invigorating as the talk was, I was disappointed. After Monday’s writing in the sand by Jude Kelly, the focus again shifts back to metrics – economic success, growth and back-patting. Is it even believable? How does this benefit the roots of the cultural sector? Or does creativity not need the arts? Discuss.

London – World Creative Capital?

A heated session which raised an interesting question from the floor – it may be good for London, but is it good for the rest of the UK?

Jude Woodward, Mayor’s Advisor, Culture, Creative Industries and Tourism

London is the most international city, a ‘world in one city’. It’s the finance epicentre – the Stock Exchange is the major global financial force. It’s situated in the middle of the major western time zones.

- 50% of Londoners are born outside London

- 33% of Londoners are born outside the UK

- 300 languages are spoken daily

We are a creative nation. ONS figure claim the UK spends 50% more on creative products than on food.

Yet Jude committed the heinous M25 faux pas of critiquing her regional rivals – claiming she was ‘concerned’ about the BBC’s move of five departments to Manchester, whether Manchester would cope with this, or actually another city may steal London’s thunder through dissipating what is strong, collective and co-located in London – the immediacy of interaction, inspiration and face-to-face stimulation operating on a global scale. London is the engine – loss of skills or jobs to regions may mean other nations benefit more than other UK cities.

An interesting consideration, but wrong I think. Making the regions stronger will make the UK stronger. Make London strong, conversely, I think can make the regions weaker. It’s complicated.

Alan Freeman, GLA Economics

2001-2 showed a mini-recession in the sector, but there has been a continual rise in creative product growth. (Although James Heartfield did make the scandalous suggestion that GLA Economics had been told to lie and subvert data to re-write their research because the story of creative decline was not what the leaders wanted to hear).

London and the South East has one third of the UK’s population, but contains nearly two thirds (58%) of the creative sector – double the density (note: interesting rhetoric here.  To be pendantic – 58% is closer to half than two thirds). Two thirds of all global industries have headquarters in London. This breaks down:

Creative jobs location:

London – 32%
South East – 26%
Rest of UK – 42%

Yet London’s creative jobs are more volatile than other sectors, and private sector jobs are more vulnerable here than in other regions.

Creative product sales are 58% to consumers, 42% to businesses.

Creative infrastructure is demand-led – but if you lose it, you won’t get it back.

Tom Campbell, London Development Agency

LDA has a budget of £500 million and employs 400 people to grow and regenerate London’s economy.

London is the biggest but it still has capacity to grow:

- 77% of the UK film industry is in London. Film London’s ‘film friendly’ policy increased filming in London boroughs by 42%.

- Frieze Art Fair – one of biggest UK art fairs, £55 million of art sales and 50,000 visitors.

Future LDA projects: Tate 2 extension; National Film Centre (BFI); more live music infrastructure; Ravensbourne College relocation; Diversity works diversity programme (though there are equality and diversity targets for all LDA projects).

Discussion:

Tom describes artists as the ‘shock troops’ of regeneration – going into an area, and starting the improvement. But I would question – how do the artists benefit? Everyone talks about the importance of arts to the creative commercial sector, but no one wants to put hand in pocket to give more to the arts (apart from a minor inflation-busting Arts Council settlement).

Economics usually asks the question – ‘how do we stimulate growth?’ Creative industries has growth, so perhaps the question is ‘what kind of growth do we want?’

Need to address diversity – not just the public school, white middle classes ascending.

But…you can’t make a meal by cutting up the pie.

Wednesday 14th November, Soho Theatre

Creativity and the Economy

Now the gloves came off.

James Heartfield – How creative is the creative city?

Easily the most controversial and engaging rant of the week – Heartfield continues his lonely diatribe exposing, guerrilla style, the ‘lies, lies and damn statistics’ of the fallacy of the creative economy.

Calling the Cox Report ‘creative accounting’ and Gordon Brown the latest leader to be ‘seduced by the mantra of creative Britain’.

Why not to invest in creative industries:

1. He claims advertising is ‘parasitic’ to the failings of other industries, rather than contributing to their growth.

2. The creative city is a policy ‘template’ on a desktop. Zurich described its creative city as “weak” – whoops, must have hired the wrong consultant.

3. Blair described Britain as the ‘design workshop of the world – leading a creative revolution’, but “Staying Ahead” reveals the poorly disguised cracks in definition and decline of sector: ‘the DCMS recognises the imperfection of the definitions’ ‘sectoral boundaries may be re-written’ and its ‘just a snapshot’. DTI Business Clusters in the UK (2001) states: “for most of the creative industries, any regional presence must be considered embryonic”.

4. Statistics are all hogwash, addressed to the arts not to economists or real businesses. GLA Economics cover up the huge decline in creative workers.

5. The creative city is promoting a culture of clone towns – everywhere is creative, ergo nowhere is creative. Charles Landry’s ‘toolkit’ creates homogenisation. “Replace one name city with another you would not know the city” (Creative City, p. 43)

6. Work Foundation and DCMS – they are like Enron and their accountants – if they were in industry, they would be in prison.

7. It’s all lies to create jobs for their friends.

8. It encourages subsidy of something that is not worth developing.

9. Sheffield Museum of Pop – a drain to the city’s economy, not an enhancement.

10. Hoxton as a template does not translate outside Hoxton. Manchester and Scotland – creative industries is not what they are known for.

Phew….beat that….

Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive, Arts Council England

There are less failures in public sector capital investment than in private. The cost of £800K for Angel of the North (Gateshead) against its value by people is far higher. The regeneration of Gateshead is valued at £1 billion.

Arts Council invest where the private sector never would, but there are commercial spin-offs, e.g. subsidised theatre feeds the commercial theatre. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys was funded by a £200K initial investment and has subsequently become commercial and toured.

Creative Partnerships project is proven to develop creative thinking skills for all subjects.

The Sultan’s Elephant – had an economic impact of £1 million for London and was a commercial-free spectacle for all to enjoy and see their city in a new light.

Dan Atkinson, Mail on Sunday

More spouting on the fantasy of the creative economy from the author of ‘Fantasy Island’, a critique of Blair’s ‘legacy’. Atkinson asks: how long can the hot air last?

The benefit of the arts and creativity is evident – but is it an economy?

Creative industries were part of the seven “daydreams” of Blair’s Britain e.g. “Cool Britannia”.

Science (1970s) was a Labour vision, technology (1980s) a Tory one.

China was once seen as marginal and ‘arty’, whereas Britain was the industrial powerhouse – now, China is the centre of manufacturing and UK is proud to be arty.

Germans: great at precision engineering.
The French: food and drink.
Scandinavians: mobile phones.
Americans: movies, aircraft, computers.

What is UK Plc’s USP?
Talk.
PR, advertising, writers, politicians.

June 2007: a £22.3 billion deficit in trade, down from £18 billion a year before.

Britain is a servant economy: four million employed is service, the same as 1860s Victorian society and three times that of creative industries. But this isn’t the right rhetoric for the government.

Lord Puttnam: Britain is “an island of creativity surrounded by a sea of understanding”. Or is it just a fantasy island? Or just an island, surrounded by sea?

The film industry is in trouble, the television industry is in trouble and the music industry is in trouble. The creative industries were in a better states when Wilson and Callaghan were in office.

Martin Smith, Ingenious Media Plc

A discussion of private investment in the creative sector. Ingenious have invested £5 billion in media since 1998.

But competition is tough: France offers tax breaks to games developers in spite of EU State Aid rules.

The UK is a ground for creativity not it is not great for competitiveness. Film, music and video games are consumer-driven and unpredictable both ways – both unprecedented gains, but also unprecedented losses.

There are three types of creative businesses:

- Creative content – IP and ideas

- Creative processes

- Creative distribution – e.g. broadcasting

All have low levels of skills and lack MBAs. Investment success is marrying the creatives with the business talent.

Risk management is investing in a slate (e.g. film slate) and not a standalone product.

Digital opportunities and threats:

- The digital threat is diminishing value with distribution and the attitude that content is free, creating investor uncertainty.

- But content is king still – there is a premium on high quality content.

- Opportunities are the proliferation of platforms, the long tail, and quality becoming more valuable over commodity.

Future value lies in rights ownership/management. The sector needs more sustainable investment to protect individuals and to not sell of ISP too cheap.

But it needs to be credible to the city – investment needs a portfolio and high quality management approaches to create a virtuous circle of investment.

Creative industries need to be taken seriously to gain investment. In economic terms – there are too many small companies who lack capacity – do we head down the drain? Or rise to the challenge – create internationally competitive companies?

There is a shortage of risk capital in media – it’s OK at start-up but it lacks the knowledgeable capital – investors who understand the sector well.

Raising £10 million for a film is hard – much is invested by wealthy individuals or the creators, but it’s a too risky approach.

In the US, $15 billion is raised from Hedge Funds to invest in a slate of 35 to 40 Hollywood blockbusters.

Discussion:

Creative industries does not work as a sector – take out digital and the sector is growing slower than the rest of the economy.

Fine art auctions are successful at growing sales, but not investment in new art production.

The creative industries are over-subsidised and under-productive.

The Arts Council have created a blurring between public good and commercial return which confuses businesses. The UK arts are not as competitive as the USA or China.

Creativity is the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ – we are more creative than other nations, but not good at selling it to others.

The UK exports its best talent – fashion to New York and Milan, video games and film to Los Angeles.

And so…to the bar…

Creative Partnerships: creative economy and the curriculum

I was invited to take part in a debate at Bristol’s Watershed on 7th November 2007 organised by Creative Partnerships, entitled: Space to think: UK – The world’s creative hub?

The ‘Space to Think’ series is held around the country as a forum for the creative, cultural, education and business sectors to meet and discuss a broad range of issues concerning creativity and learning.

Creative Partnerships is the Government’s flagship creativity programme for schools and young people, managed by Arts Council England and funded by the DCSF and DCMS. It enables schools to work with participatory artists (visuall artists, designers, musicians, theatre etc) to devise integrated creative learning programmes and activities – and at pilot stage it has been hugely successful with national roll-out looming.

I was on a panel with two very illuminating people:

TC Jefferson - a creativity and learning consultant who has worked with Creative Partnerships and also Chew TV in Plymouth. TC expounded the failing of the curriculum as a mechanism, but also the need for continually investigating new ways of learning.

Lucy Byatt, the director of Spike Island (artist studios, galleries and design incubator) spoke about her own background crossing the rock path from education to practice, and also the story of how Spike transformed from a squatted community to a bastion of the cultural infrastructure of Bristol.

Feeling like the boring glue that sticks things together, I spoke about creative industries and the creative economy, both in the South West and nationally, with some statistics on the state of UK creativity and how this fits with Higher Education – including the shocking statistic that one year’s design undergraduates represents 50% of the commercial design industry – which is itself in rapid decline.

In a discussion, educators and creative professionals discussed how enterprise is becoming embedded, for better or worse, in curriculum, but it is a slow process. There needs to be also a sense of learning for learning’s sake with all levels of education, and also, I think, creativity for creativity’s sake.

South West Creative Summit, 27th June 2007

This week, the Creative Industries team at South West Regional Development Agency (where I’m currently working) hosted an event called the South West Creative Summit in Bristol. The event was due to co-ordinate with the launch of the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s Creative Economy Programme, but, as a week in politics goes, it was all change. The expected Green Paper has been delayed until the autumn, but instead a weighty doorstopper tomb called “Staying Ahead: The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries” by Will Hutton and the Work Foundation came out on June 25th – which of course no one (including guest speaker Phil Clapp from DCMS) had read yet.

The report has eight recommendations for developing the UK’s as the leading global hub for Creative Industries. Read a 3-minute potted summary and points. More on this when I’ve read the tomb myself, currently guiltily sitting on my desk. It’ll be interesting to see how much is taken into the Green Paper (a discussion proposal), which is rumoured will never become a White Paper (policy recommendation) – but at least we’ve had a good debate about our own vision for the creative industries in the meantime.

The other change of player was the throning of Gordon Brown as PM on 27th June – which gave an interesting slant to the preceedings and, in my mind, asks more questions about how long Creative Industries will be a key priority for government – the new broom and all that. Still, Hutton’s report claims that the UK Creative Industries are as important to the economy as the finance sector, clearly talking the former-Chancellor’s language.

So against this backdrop, 150 delegates, mainly from the South West region’s public sector partners, with some leading business directors, met up to get all ‘gun-ho’ about the potential for the creative economy of the region. A number of the partners had been curious/confused about what the event’s purpose was. Assuming the main target was impressing the powers-that-be at the Development Agency itself (with speeches by its Chief Executive, Jane Henderson, and Chair, Juliet Williams) – the event was a tour-de-force. Secondly, it was an opportunity to draw together all the partners to think about strengthening and morale building ‘Team South West’ and putting this ‘weird shaped’ (to quote Tom Fleming) region on the map, and to celebrate was The Guardian have called ‘the cool, creative South West’.

The night before, a welcome reception was held at the sumptous surroundings of the Royal West of England Academy, where 50 years of the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol were celebrated, with speeches by department head Neil Nightingale (yes, really!) and its co-founder and first producer Tony Soper. Through their anecdotes and an impressive showreel, it was amazing to see how much the wildlife film industry had changed since the 1950s when novice nature enthusiasts took out camera to shoot hours of grainy black and white footage. Now, shows for international audiences like Planet Earth, are produced for a multi-platform, multi-media world (with multi-million pound budgets!) with the latest cutting-edge technologies, making images that would have been unthinkable in 1957. As Bristol is home to 25% of the world’s natural history tv output, and significant events like Wildscreen Festival and ARKive (education archive), it shouldn’t be underestimated how such a significant ‘hub’ can have an impact on Bristol – both in terms of influencing content and themes, creating spin-out companies, and the use of digital technology in TV production.

The main day featured many impressive keynote speakers:

David Kester (Director of the Design Council) told us South West businesses invested above the average in design, with 70% using design for communications, and 40% for digital. Prince Albert had a vision for the Great Exhibition, linking the superb Victorian designers with manufacturing. The Design Council’s Designing Demand programme seeks to build these links to teach business how to maximise on design. Today, the design industry employs 185,000 people and contributes £11.5 billion to the UK economy. 90% of the environmental impact of a product is determined at design stage, so creativity can have an impact on both sustainability and productivity.

Andrew Curry (Director of the Henley Centre HeadlightVision) showed us a vision of the coming shape of the creative economy. In the 1980s, media was about consumption, in the 1990s it was about choice, and in the noughties it’s about creation. There are new means of exploring content through digital media and the media itself is becoming more valueless – Metro is the fastest growing international newspaper and it’s given away free.

What futorologist Alvin Toffler in 1980 called the ‘prosumer’ is now User-Generated Content. According to the 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto, Markets are now ‘conversations’ between society, business and consumers. Curry showed us the errors of putting the brand in the hands of the consumer to mash-up via a misguided Chevy Tahoe advert. The gas-guzzling superbrand’s open platform became a protesting environmentalists’ wet dream.

Web 1.0 was about connecting desktop to desktop, Web 2.0 browser to browser, and Web 3.0 connecting the virtual with the physical. ‘Fan fiction’ – engaging before, after and during the event (most significantly through TV web forums) – fan responses, mash-ups and parodies will become more commonplace, which will have implications for copyright and ownership for brand and content owners. If you ‘ban’ fan fiction, you will alienate your audience. Andrew showed us a fab Harry Potter, parody video – ‘the mysterious ticking noise‘.

Anthony Lilley (Chief Executive, Magic Lantern Productions) talked about when public service meets interactive media. Today, a 14-year-old doesn’t know a world without internet, tv without remote controls, or a world without console games. Second Life has 25,000 users in it at one time, which isn’t yet a force for change but is a useful ‘focus group’ for testing ideas. The drivers for change are choice, control, conversations, community (and anything else beginning with c). Innovators needs to build risk into the start of production – quality is better than meeting delivery deadlines (Windows Vista case in point) and work out how to measure impacts not outputs.

Jane Henderson (Chief Executive of South West RDA), presented her vision for ‘changing the world a bit by changing this bit of the world’. Overall, emphasing how commited the Agency is to supporting the infrastructure and change needed to grow the South West’s creative industries, even though it challenges the usual government ways of working. (At this point, I realised my efforts to ’sex up’ her speech may have not quite hit the mark. ‘Hot Fuzz’s post-modern mash up’ may have sounded better on paper!).

Chris Powell (Chair of NESTA) rounded of the keynote speeches. Although the UK ’s creative industries employs 1 million directly and 800,000 creative people are within non-creative businesses, the weakness is that their growth links to the overall strength of the economy – in good times, people buy creativity, in bad times they don’t, so the industry can yo-yo. The iPod is 4% design and manufacture, and 96% experiential. Creative industries sell experiences and lifestyle, but every other country in the world now see them as a key to their success and think they are good at it too, so our global competition is fierce!

The Afternoon was taken by workshop sessions on creative places, knowledge transfer, skills, new markets, and digital media, for which there are some interesting supporting papers online and some summaries to follow (when I pull my finger out )

Finally, Nick Capaldi (Chief Executive of Arts Council England, South West) roused and caroused the ‘pledges’ from all partners and businesses as to what they would contribute to the region’s creative economy. Most were generic rather than specific or transformational, but it was a good means of drawing the spirit of everyone together among the collective branding and vision of the event – ‘create, engage, transform’.