How growth agenda can play an important part in creative industries
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by Malcolm Hyde regional director, CBI south
east
In the last edition of these pages, I was quite taken with
my co-contributor David Philpott's reference to the Oscars, Baftas
and the entertainment industry in general.
It was only a small leap to link this with the UK's growth
agenda and the important part that could be played by our creative
industries sector.
The term "creative industries" covers an array of businesses,
from music to film, computer games to architecture, advertising to
media, which together contribute over eight per cent of the UK's
GDP - and they have grown at twice the rate of the wider economy
for the past five years.
The growth of the digital environment is driving huge structural
changes in the sector.
It is shifting product boundaries, making geographies irrelevant
and reshaping channels between business and consumers. Online
piracy and fragmentation of advertising revenues are also forcing a
rethink of commercial models.
There is much talk of the creative industries as if they were a
homogenous group but, as the diversity listed above shows, they are
not.
It is hard to think of them creating a cluster in any meaningful
sense of the word and in parts of the country, the population in
any of these groupings is too small to make such a claim.
Not so in the South East. With a growth rate twice that of the
overall economy, we should examine how we can foster their
development.
What would be the key elements of a strategy to support the
creative sectors?
The first must be to allow companies to derive value from their
intellectual property, generating sufficient returns to enable them
to continue to invest. Then we must secure a supply of skilled
individuals for creative roles, whether fashion designers,
architects or computer programmers, to support the growth of the
sector.
Creative industry companies are largely SMEs, so access to
start-up and development capital is crucial, and we need to support
the infrastructure to support the new business models.
And lastly, we can examine how public procurement can support
the creative sector. From broadcasting and programme production,
through advertising and design, to architects and civil engineers,
public organisations in the South East have the opportunity to
foster the development of these businesses through being
challenging and creative clients.
Outside London, both Brighton and Guildford enjoy the status of
being in the UK's top nine hotspots. These are very mobile
businesses - so why not Kent?
Monday, June 13 2011
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