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Three key words for the creative industries emerge from the foundational definition suggested by the CITF in 1998: ‘individual creativity’, ‘intellectual property’ and

9 This may be considered as the moment when the original objective of the conceptual family was finally achieved.

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‘wealth and job creation’. As Bilton (2007: xvii) points out, the definition seems to correspond well to the conventional value chain in the sector. If an ‘industry’ can be understood as the ‘individuals and enterprises’ which produce ‘goods or services with some common characteristics that make them complements or substitutes in consumption’ (Throsby, 2008a: 218), the common characteristics of creative industries are defined to be the creativity and intellectual property positioned at the two ends of the value chain. When intellectual property becomes commercialized and contents are consumed, the final aim of the creative industries is achieved in the production of wealth and jobs. This wealth and job creation through creative activities will become in turn conducive to the enhancement of individual creativity in the society.

(1) Individual Creativity

Although this is a kind of circular process, there is no doubt that individual creativity is the base and the starting point of it all. For Smith (1998: 50-51), creativity in its widest sense is at the heart of British competitiveness as the ‘foundation of a new generation of high-tech, high-skills industries’, since creative ‘ideas are the building blocks of innovation, and innovation builds industries’. What then is this ‘creativity’?

Much of the literature on creativity often depends on ‘the etymological roots of the word, seeing creativity as about bringing something into existence, generating, inventing, dealing imaginatively with seemingly intractable problems’ (Landry &

Bianchini, 1995: 18). However, it should be noted that the recent version of creativity, which have also been adopted by British policymakers, seem rather different from traditional aesthetic, romantic, and psychological ones in several aspects. Firstly, this individual creativity is a democratized version of creativity as a personal capacity. Here, creativity is no longer simply the natural talent of a handful of genius types, which cannot be earned by others. Secondly, it is also a rationalized version, in that it does not imply a kind of irrational state of mind as a necessary factor of creativity. It can be also regarded as a more pragmatic version in that it does not just point to personal capacity, but to the final outcome of using it. The perspective that creativity does not depend on the outcome but the capacity or the ideas that emerge from it is strongly denied. Finally, therefore, this version of creativity notes not only the importance of individual personalities and capacities, but also the collective conditions and processes involved in applying creativity in the real world. Collective performance toward beneficial innovation as the result of managing individuals’ creative ideas and skills cannot be stressed strongly enough in this version.

41 To be concise, the more democratized, rationalized, pragmatic and collectivistic type of creativity at stake here might be summarized as the combination of ‘artistic’

competences (novelty/originality) and ‘managerial’ performances (usefulness/value) which are open to any human being (Bilton, 2007; Sternberg, 2006). For instance, All Our Futures, one of the key reports which was published in the early days of New Labour CI policy, defined creativity as ‘imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value’ (NACCCE, 1999: 29). Policymakers’

adoption of the new creativity must be greatly influenced by the fact that this creativity appears apposite to the tight convergence of culture and the economy. At the same time, however, by distancing itself from the elitist tone of ‘culture’, this version of creativity also seeks to be wide enough to encourage the self-fulfilment of all individuals and thus to produce social benefits for the whole community. The basic structure of the British CI discourse, first put into place in the CI Mapping Document, has been constructed through this dialectic between the creativity of each and every individual and its combined socio-economic usages and value.

(2) Intellectual Property

As discussed earlier, most crucial to this political initiative of New Labour’s was ‘the identification of the creative industries’ with the ‘new economy’ (O’Connor, 2007: 42).

Hence, it was often argued that within and through this new economy ‘creativity, culture, national identity and the nation’s future wealth are all inextricably bound up together’ (Smith, 1998: 147).

As John Howkins (2001) argues in his influential book, The Creative Economy: How People make Money from Ideas, intellectual property is far from a homogeneous entity.

It consists of at least four distinctive types: patents, copyrights, trademarks and industrial design (Howkins, 2001: 31-70). The first of these, patents are the clearest example of intellectual property as property, and not merely as property but as monopolies. Copyrights exists only in ‘qualifying’ works which must be original and have involved the author’s skill and labour, although the test of originality and skill is lower than the tests for a patent. At the next level, come trademarks such as brands, which require neither any unique inventiveness as patents do, nor any intellectual or artistic effort as copyrighted work does. However, they have become the core factor in most marketplace competition. Finally, industrial design can be protected both by registration like a patent and by a ‘design right’ like copyright. This categorization of

42 intellectual property right (IPR) was well received by British policymakers,¹⁰ resulting in the transformation of The Patent Office (1852) into The Intellectual Property Office (2007).

Having explained the concept of intellectual property, a question then emerges, why was intellectual property singled out among various types of innovation based on individual creativity? This is probably due to the fact that intellectual property has been regarded the ‘currency’ of the new economy (Bilton, 2007: xviii). On this ground, the exploitation of IPR has been considered as ‘the crucial link’ between various agendas for ‘positioning the creative industries at the forefront of economic competitiveness’

(O’Connor, 2007: 42-43). It can thus be argued that the post-organizational restructuring of the previous economic and social orders accelerated the coming of the knowledge economy or information society, which, in the end, brought about the emergence of IPR. What the DCMS sought to do was to jump on this bandwagon.

Given the variety of intellectual property itself and the complexity of the broader shift behind it, the phrase, ‘generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ in the definition, never implies a simple task. Although it might be simple to identify the origin of intellectual property (i.e. individual creativity, skill and talent), it is indeed a complex and complicated process to transform or actualize them into tangible social and economic capital. Therefore, as Smith put it (1998: 106), ‘it is content above all that matters’ in the situation where the rapidly developing technology of the new economy furnishes not only greater demand, but also the ‘possibility of a new framework for trading in rights’. In this way, IPR, as the currency of the new economy or the trophy of the innovation industries, has become one of the most prominent concepts in the UK discourse of CI policy.

(3) Wealth and Job Creation

Roughly speaking, it may well be reasonable to label the policies developed to address the need for enhancing individual creativity as creative education policy, and those for promoting the importance of IPR as creative economy policy. Then, what policy was devised for addressing ‘wealth and job creation’, the last key word? Two kinds of policy can be separately noted. The first was the creative business policy designed to support private companies within CI to grow quickly and stably; and the other was the creative

10 Http://www.ipo.gov.uk/about/history.htm [Accessed on 11 April 2011].

43 city policy designed to provide a favourable ecology for creativity and articulate its fruits with the regeneration of British cities.

Since the emerging creative industries had looked promising, it was repeatedly argued by New Labour policymakers that the future hope for the nation could be found in these emerging industries (Blair, 2007; Brown, 2008). In the end, however, it is the private sector that employs the creative talent and produces tangible profits. Put another way, the ‘government can never do the work of creating’, although ‘it can and must support those who do’ (Smith, 1998: 142). Therefore, the Labour government sought to secure the conditions in which British ‘content providers’ (ibid.: 106) could create IPR and thereby wealth and jobs. Indeed, enabling creative businesses to grow was always a key task for the New Labour government to achieve the master objective of moving CI ‘from the fringes to the mainstream’ (DCMS, 2001: 3) or putting CI ‘at the heart of the economy’ (DCMS, 2008: 9).

In helping creative enterprises grow, the policymakers have also noted the importance of the city. As the major site where the production and consumption of content happens, cities can provide a ‘creative milieu’ (Landry, 2000) of which the production companies can take advantage. To borrow Florida’s terms, ‘tolerance’ in a city can attract ‘talent’

to the city and the talent can induce ‘technology’ into the city (Florida, 2002). In the reverse direction, the jobs and wealth created through the activities of the creative economy in and around cities can be directly translated into the capital with which chronic problems such as physical run-down and social exclusion can be tackled (Matarasso, 1997; 2005). The ‘Barcelona model’, noted by Richard Rogers in leading the Urban Task Force under New Labour, may be one of the most referenced exemplars by the policymakers (Monclús, 2003). Numerous Millennium projects and the bid to select Britain’s second city as European Capital of Culture in 2008 (Griffiths, 2006) were also significant drives in this policy initiative. As a result, for Tony Blair (2007), British ‘cities have been regenerated around new industries and new galleries. We have become the world’s creative hub’.

Up to this point, in order to discern the British CI policy framework, I have noted the foundational definition of CI and discussed its three key words of creativity, intellectual property, and wealth and job creation. As a result, some core areas of British CI policy have been identified: creative education, the creative economy, creative business and the creative city. There is, however, another different policy area, which covers the role of government over all the processes mentioned above, which may be called

44 creative governance policy. The next section seeks to discuss the five policy areas in greater detail so as to flesh out the framework.