File sharers are big spenders too!

Huh! Interesting! BBC News today reveals research by Demos that people who download music illegally also spend almost twice (£77 per month) compared with £44 per mth spent averagely by those who don't download - the Govt give a mealy mouthed response and manage to face both ways in typical political double speak - but critically they pronounce that "The scale of unlawful file-sharing poses a real threat to the long-term sustainability of our creative industries". This is simply not true. What it does do is reinforce the need for the creative industries (well, the big music producer boys, at any rate!) to get more creative, more imaginative about their business models. File sharing, downloading, is here to stay. When Mandelson (rather uncharacteristically I thought - he's usually more in touch than this - must be the company he's keeping!) threatened his draconian response to free downloading, most of the young people I know and work with just laughed - and continued downloading. And the interesting thing about that is that most of those young people are musicians and music makers...........

Govt has got to realise that they cannot put the lid back on this particular box. But they will insist on
listening to the wrong people - from Govt's own statistics, the creative industries is characterised by 94% of companies who employ less than 10 people - in fact the vast majority employ between 1 and 5 people. These are small businesses - and Govt has no mechanisms for hearing the voice of small creative businesses!

So instead they listen to the voice of the 6% minority who qualify as large companies, and who, turn out to be the very people who have grown large and rich by exploiting (through publishing and distributing etc) the creativity and IP of the small businesses - so the major music businesses, for example, whose market is rapidly disappearing as independent musicians learn how to publish and distribute their work themselves over the internet, now go wailing to government about how the creative industries are in danger from this unregulated behaviour and, idiotically, Government listen!! Instead of celebrating this new world where potentially artists take more control of their work, their market and their earnings!

What do we have to do to get Govt to realise that the world has changed? We now have an economy that is knowledge based, where the ecology is moving away from large monolithic companies to the vibrancy and fast moving culture of small and micro businesses for whom rules of practice are changing every day - all the old criteria that Government still use to identify '"success" are largely irrelevant - if a creative company doesn't "last for more than three years", that doesn't necessarily mean failure; it just means that they have chosen to move on to something else; if they don't "employ more than 5 people" , that doesn't mean that they don't know how to grow; it means that they choose to stay small - often so that their capacity for collaboration across a range of activities remains an essential part of their business practice! We don't have to behave - and indeed we don't behave - the way the companies behaved in the old manufacturing economy days - with huge investments in capital and labour that made fast moving agendas impossible to handle. We are fleet of foot, we change our perspectives and our business practice as we go, we are global in outlook and practice, we collaborate and then break up again, we offer no job security but we offer adventure, challenge, risk and reward - and we are much more fun - come on, Government, wake up and hear the music!

CIDA International Update

It occurs to me that the refurb of our website (www.cida.org) is taking longer than I expected, so I thought it might be useful to let people know what we are working on at the moment - as ever, it is hectically busy but it's also fun and challenging, the kind of mix everyone likes -

As ever, the creativity and the innovation agendas march side by side and it's fascinating to be working on how we bring them together to complement each other - Keith and I are going to be working with up to 25 businesses (5 days consultancy each) in Barnsley between now and January - I have my first client, a brilliant photographer Gavin Joynt, (www.gavinjoynt.co.uk) in the next week or so, and just looking at his website makes me feel excited - but we'll be working with businesses across all sectors, taking them through our Innovation process and helping to embed it in the DNA of the companies, so I think the experience will contain riches for all of us! As some of you know, we have a team of Innovation Coaches, including Lee Corner (http://www.lac-ltd.com/), Steve Manthorp (http://www.manthorp.co.uk/) and Val Monti Holland (no website, Val?), who are all based in Yorkshire, and a team based elsewhere including London, US and Australia but who all work with us on different projects. We all went through the training led by Herman Gyr and Laszlo Gyorffy (http://www.enterprisedevelop.com/) from Silicon Valley and we each bring our creative practice experience together with innovation process to create an unusual but tried and tested approach to help companies capture the innovation within their own workforce, colleagues and even clients.

Of course, Innovation is proving to be the new mantra, just like creativity was before it. Creativity as a word seems to have almost lost its meaning and I guess Innovation is going the same way - but the debate is intense and the thing I love is how the discussion has moved from trying to make creativity and innovation the latest tool in standard management thinking to the dawning realisation that standard management thinking itself is of the past. How funny it is for those of us who've spent most of our working lives in the creative sector, and lived with what that means (i.e. no job security, portfolio working, non hierarchical micro businesses, emphasis on collaboration, 'operating in hope of success instead of fear of failure'!) now to see how most industry sectors are slowly having to adapt to working the way we do - and to see how management theory is having to adapt to that!

Anyway, it makes life fun and we are enjoying it - we started a Raise the Bar course last week - this time especially for 20 established dancer/choreographers who want to develop their practice/business. Funded by the Arts Council, Yorkshire Dance Centre (led by the ineffable Wieke Ericke), has established a new CPD programme of which our course is part. It's 8 sessions between now and December. The first day was on Vision and Values and, at the end, one of them commented to Lee and Chantelle (our Course Directors) that she just wanted the day to go on and on - they all loved it and it made them think about themselves and their practice in a way they hadn't done before. That kind of reaction makes everyone feel good!

I kicked the day off with my presentation on Attributes of a Creative Entrepreneur. I've done it all over the world over the last few years and every time I do it, it gets a massively strong response. Once I was doing it in Saudi Arabia whilst Keith was doing it in Leeds and Lee was doing it in Utrecht - we were phoning each other as we finished just to hear each other's audiences' reactions! But the presentation has been given extra weight recently as we have just finished doing some interviews with UK creative entrepreneurs for the West Yorkshire Lifelong Learning Network (WYLLN). It reinforced a lot of our thinking but we also added in some of the more practical skills, like Marketing, Finance, IP etc, and it's made for an interesting pamphlet, I think - I am presenting next week to a WYLLN seminar and then will explore developing it into a book with Lee (Corner) collaborating to write the case studies. Since we have worked with creative entrepreneurs all over the world, there are some fabulous stories to tell so I think the problem might be choosing which ones we actually use! But we are also thinking of putting case studies on the CIDA website and portal (www.creativeportal.org) as a regular item, so I'm sure they'll all get used, one way or another!

Talking of books, Ana Carla Fonseca, a fabulous Creative Industries specialist in Sao Paulo, and Peter Kageyama of Creative Cities Summits, based in Tampa, Florida, both of whom work with us on various projects, are putting together a book due out before the end of the year. Called Creative City Perspectives, it features articles by about 18 different commentators (including me!) and has an Introduction by Charles Landry. After all the work involved in coordinating such a book, it's getting exciting seeing it coming to fruition -

Am happy to tell you we recently won a contract with the West Midlands Business Link to provide Innovation Advisory Services for SME businesses - that hasn't started yet but should be stimulating when it does. And of course we continue working with our partners in Doncaster Council - we are working with their LEGI programme, Success Doncaster, and meeting some extraordinary creative businesses; and the Council is also a partner in our Interreg ECCE Innovation transnational programme which is a fascinating project. As part of it, we've commissioned Graham Devlin to undertake a piece of research for us, looking at how HE supports R&D in the arts sector - he's taken an unexpected approach to it and I think it will prove fairly provocative in the end. Hopefully, it will be ready by the end of the year, and we'll be running a conference early next year to launch it.

Talking of European projects, we've won two Leonardo contracts, one to do with creativity and the other to do with innovation - working with Finland, Flanders and Barcelona on the latter - I'm particularly happy that at last we have a partner from the sunny South! - and Denmark joins us on the other. They both demand interesting work that complements what we are doing elsewhere so the synchronicity has been useful. The whole creativity and innovation agenda is a real hot topic in the EU just now - Keith has been invited to be founding member of a new EU network, EICI, that focuses just on this, so we are in at the heart of it all!

Finally, for now, we continue to work with the British Council Creative Economy Unit on their Creative Enterprise programme in Sub Saharan Africa. I'm probably going out to Kenya and Nigeria next month to work with tutors out there to help in the delivery of the course - meanwhile, the artists we worked with in Zimbabwe a few months ago are even now going from major city to major city in that country, delivering the course we did with them - apparently, it's going beautifully and Virginia ( Pirie, writer, www.nai.uu.se , and all round fabulous woman!) dropped me a note to say how responsive all the participants were - how fantastic that they can continue to develop their creative businesses and practice despite all that is going on out there -

There are a number of other possibilities on the horizon and exciting negotiations going on, from Middlesborough to Singapore - but I'd better wait for confirmations before I talk about them - !

Ah, well - there is one more thing you might be interested in! - I've been invited to address the Commonwealth Business Conference in Trinidad this November. It's all hugely formal, with Presidents, Prime Ministers and Ministers as well as leading international business leaders attending - I've been invited because of 'CIDA's strong global presence and experience in the creative industries' so all that travelling has paid off! Seriously, it's a thrill and I'm delighted - and, by the way, there is already a queue of people offering to carry my bags.................................!!

That's it for now - but there have been some really interesting pieces posted on the LinkedIn groups I belong to so will add them later on - does one say good bye at the end of a blog? Seems odd - I wonder what the etiquette is?