Understanding the Engine of Creativity in a Creative Economy: An Interview with John Howkins
(The document is also available in PDF format)
By Donna Ghelfi, Program Officer, Creative Industries Division, Office of Strategic Use of Intellectual Property for Development, WIPO
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“Creativity” permeates our daily lives from the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we retire in the evening. In ‘modern’ 20th century society, this creativity and invention follows us throughout our day as we make our way to work, during our shopping sprees, at the groceries, and in the evenings as we catch the latest blockbuster movie at our favorite cinema.
To understand creativity and the significance of intellectual property in seeking to exploit ‘private property’ for profit, we turn to the book on “The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas” by the author John Howkins2. Published in 2001, the book has become a point of reference for those seeking to merge creativity with business acumen.
Mr. Howkins, who was recently in Geneva to attend the second World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Inter-sessional Intergovernmental Meeting on a Development Agenda, (June 20 to 22, 2005) took time to meet with me to elaborate on the growing importance of creative economies.
Donna Ghelfi (DG) – Mr. Howkins, would you please share with us key points about your background and career?
John Howkins (JH) – I have had a mixed career. I started as a journalist and began writing on television and communications, media and satellite, cable and new technologies. Then I became a policy consultant, Executive Director of the International Institute of Communications3, which has members in about 100 countries. It is the only worldwide think-tank of communications technology and policy. I worked at the global policy level and then moved on to the business side where my main work was with Time Warner about developing new companies to develop film and television properties and assets. I now have two lives; the first is working as a business person. I am Director of a number of companies – film and television business and the second, in parallel, I help countries, cities, and corporations to explore creativity and manage creativity; in particular in how to turn their creativity into money, and this is when intellectual property kicks in.
DG – What inspired you or rather what was the turning point for your focused involvement with ‘creativity’?
JH – In the late 1990s there was a lot of focus on technology, on computers and Information Technology (IT): the dot.com boom, the web, the Internet, and I thought it was missing out a lot on what to me, in my business, is what makes it all tick, which is the individuals having ideas. I felt that in some way they were being ignored in favour of the technology, and I wanted to bring it back to the people having ideas: how do you encourage people to have ideas; how they work together to have ideas; how they sometimes go away and do it on their own and then, how they protect those ideas and develop those ideas and make a business of that.
- In the same way as successive generations of managers have needed to learn about computers and the Internet, so they now have to learn about intellectual property.
DG – Did you encounter this yourself or did you see people experiencing these challenges?
JH – It was many people coming to me saying ‘we want to start a business’; ‘we want to develop this software’; ‘we have a film idea’; ‘we have an idea for publishing’, or ‘we have an idea for an e-commerce project’. In many cases, they did not know how to go about it. Law firms weren’t really interested in helping them and governments didn’t really understand. So I thought there was something going on there that needed attention, starting with banks and all sorts of finance and from public institutions, and in particular governments.
[People] are buying and selling words, music, pictures; gadgets, computer software, genes; copyrights, trademarks, patents; proposals, formats, fame, faces, reputation, brands, colours. The goods on sale in this noisy marketplace are the rights to use or, in the lawyers phrase, to exploit intellectual property.
DG – So it started with the idea of the ‘ideas’? You then wrote the book entitled “The Creative Economy.” You go from the creative ‘individual’ to the creative economy, what a leap.
JH – Yes, it is, but actually if you look at the big successful companies, they are all based on the ideas of usually one or two individuals about doing something differently or something better than somebody else, and that’s what it all boils down to. Initially, I started looking at the arts, in the cultural fields, in what is normally taken to be the creative industries; but actually I think it is wider. I think creativity is critical not only in the so-called creative industries but almost anywhere--- town planning, urban transport, hotel management, and all sorts of things. It comes down to the recognition of the extraordinary talent within individuals and enabling them how to develop their talent in a corporate form.
Creativity is not new and neither is economics, but what is new is the nature and extent of the relationship between them, and how they combine to create extraordinary value and wealth.
DG – So why did you not stick with a term such as the Knowledge society, or the Information society?
JH – The word ‘information’ seems to me to be a bit dead and passive. I looked at the history of the word information. It has changed quite dramatically over the past 40 to 50 years. It has been taken over to a large extent by computer systems, computers, and it doesn’t bring in the action of the human being, the human mind; it doesn’t bring in the human emotion, all the passion of acting upon. People act on information to have an idea, so information did not seem to be enough.
‘Knowledge’ seemed to be a bit bookish, a bit academic; something out there. Whereas what I wanted to look at was in here (pointing to his head), in the brain, in my mind, and how I can manage my brain to have a new or a better idea. So somehow the words ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ seemed not quite to get to where I wanted to be. The word creativity, which is the same word we use ‘to create’ and used to describe God as the Creator, seemed to relate to something incredibly primeval. I took a rather spiritual approach to this and I think that is how people see their own creativity. It is something deeply personal. People will say, “I’ve had an idea” “what do you think of it?” (the creative product or service) and everybody else will pay a bit of attention and look forward to being stimulated and even excited. So there is a sense of giving birth – and it is very personal; it’s a bit spiritual and it’s certainly very private to start with. The words information and knowledge did not capture all of those sorts of questions or emotions, and feelings and possessiveness. So by choosing the terms creativity and the Creative Economy, I wanted to bring it back to something more personal.
DG – So, how do you define the Creative Economy?
JH – I think I would define it by saying that it’s an economy where the major inputs and outputs are ideas. I would also say it’s an economy where most people spend most of their time in having ideas. It’s an economy or society where people worry, think about their capacity to have an idea; where they don’t do just a 9 to 5 job something routine and repetitive, which is what most people did for many years whether it was in the field or in the factory. It’s where people, at any stage – talking to their friends, having a glass of wine, waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning – think they can have an idea that actually works, not just an idea with some sort of esoteric pleasure, but the driver of their career and their thoughts of status and their thoughts of identity.
The ‘creative economy’ consists of the transactions in (the resulting) creative products. Each transaction may have two complementary values: the value of the intangible, intellectual property and the value of the physical carrier or platform (if any). In some industries, such as digital software, the intellectual property value is higher. In others, such as art, the unit cost of the physical object is higher.
DG – You seem to want to put back humanism in the idea of the economy.
JH – It’s very humanistic, it’s deeply humanistic.
DG – How has the term The Creative Economy been received?
JH – The term The Creative Economy has become extraordinarily widespread throughout the world. I mean, I’ve traveled all over the world now, and people, everybody wants to be creative, every country wants to be creative, every city wants to be known as creative. It’s getting a little ridiculous. I would love to come across a city that says we don’t want to be creative at all or at least uses the word in a more precise way than most people now tend to do. The term creativity has become a little worn, a little overused. I keep on trying to reaffirm the basic principles of it. Everybody has its own interpretation of it. My own interpretation is very much based on the individual making his or her own way in the world as an individual creating their sense of self-identity, and through that, their business. That chain between individual self-identity and business is not accepted by everyone. Many people just can’t be bothered to think about the humanistic beginnings of it, and are just looking at the economic and social side of it. I don’t have a problem with that but I myself do make a connection with the humanist origins, when people in Europe began to realize around the 17th century that they, as individuals could create and be original in ways that hitherto had been reserved only for God or some other universal creator. So that is why this creative economy will become extraordinarily powerful. If it is a way of working that recognizes that, it will become very very powerful.
DG – What is the distinction between creativity and innovation?
JH – I make a big distinction. The distinction may not be in my book, but it is something I’ve explored more recently. Creativity is in the individual and it is subjective; Innovation is group-based and is objective. Innovation always goes to a Committee at some stage and will only be allowed to continue if it is approved. Whereas creativity is much more fuzzy and subjective. Creativity can move to innovation; creativity can power innovation; creativity can result in innovation. Innovation never causes creativity. Think about a pop song: pop songs can be very creative. Someone who writes a song that has words and a rhythm, a lyric, and a sound that we all like is being creative. But it is not innovative. Someone like Tom Cruise can be creative (but) he is not innovative. A film producer, a film director, an orchestra conductor, a designer can be creative, but not innovative.
DG – Is there a distinction then between artistic creativity and scientific creativity?
JH – Well, scientific creativity is an interesting thing. I was talking to Sir John Sulston who was the head of the British arm of the search of the Human Genome two years ago. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2002 for physiology and medicine. John was saying that his work was not creative. He was rather resisting the phrase. He was saying ‘all we do is work very hard, compare figures; we’re not creative at all.’ He rebelled against being seen as someone who was a bit fuzzy and romantic. He made this remark in a meeting of the Commission on Intellectual Property, consisting of about 20 eminent people and most said ‘John, you’re talking rubbish’. And I agree with them. I think that scientists can be as creative as an artist. There is no question in my mind about that. A lot of artists are not creative. They make, they paint another landscape, and it’s technically okay; but it’s not what I would call truly creative. A lot of computer programmers are not really creative but they write programs and one or two are truly creative.
DG – So the idea comes first, whether you are an artist or a scientist. What you do with the idea will differentiate your creative product and/or innovation?
JH – Innovation is a social process. It’s much more to do with developing a new way, a new method, new methodology of doing something for the market, and taking it to the consumer.
DG – In your book you say…
“Both arts and science are attempting to imagine (to visualize) and describe (to represent) the nature and meaning of reality. The difference comes in why they choose to do so, how they present their imagining to the world, and how they protect its economic value. Put simply, the creativity is the same; the creative products are different.” (The Creative Economy, pp. xi)
Do you still maintain this?
JH – Absolutely. Yes.
DG – In this context, what is the role of intellectual property (IP)?
JH – Intellectual property used to be an arcane and boring subject, something for specialists only, but within the past few years it has become a powerful influence on the way everyone has ideas and owns them, as well as on global economic output.
People need to make money out of their ideas. So they need to be given some form of exclusive rights over their ideas. Therefore, we have copyright, patent, trademarks and other legal proprietary systems. It’s one of the ways, and in some industries it’s the major way. In other industries, it’s not the major way but it’s important. But how do they do that? Against that, I would say, just as the people having the idea benefited from having access to everyone else’s idea, so that when we grant a monopoly right, whether it’s copyright or a patent, or a trademark – although in many ways all these are very different – we should do so in such a way that we should finely balance off the individuals right to a need and a certain justification to earn money; and if it does something wonderful, s/he earns lots of money. I’ve no problem with people getting very rich indeed, no problem at all with allowing other people to get access to that work, or idea. I think that’s where the current problem is, and that is what we are now discussing here at WIPO during this IIM meeting, and in other fora. We haven’t got it right yet. There are some people that say there is no problem. I’m a director of a film company. Our assets are completely copyrighted. We need to protect our copyright. There is no question about that. Someone writes a song, writes a novel, has an idea, develops a logo, a brand. Absolutely they should be protected. There’s no question. The more we move over to an economy based on ideas, the more we need to ensure that the people who develop those ideas have a good life. We would all ‘potter’ if it doesn’t happen.
DG – That is, have a good life and a right to remuneration?
JH – Well, it’s more than a right to remuneration because the right to remuneration is like “I’ll give you a compulsory license and you can get a little bit of the crumbs.” You know, I’m talking more than that. I mean, I think that people who do something which is remarkable and wonderful should be allowed to make money out of it. Because in some industries doing something remarkable and wonderful is usually very expensive and very risky. One needs to bring in lots of money to support other stuff. At the same time, you also need to have a set of rules that allow people access to the ideas, the work and the knowledge that have been generated through this creative economy. It’s a fine balance that is slightly off-balance at the moment.
Entrepreneurs in the creative economy (often called ‘creative entrepreneurs’) … use creativity to unlock the wealth that lies within themselves. Like true capitalists, they believe that this creative wealth, if managed right, will engender more wealth. … These entrepreneurs share five characteristics: (i) vision (ii) focus (iii) financial acumen (iv) pride and (v) urgency.
DG – That brings us to the ‘creative industries’. What are they?
JH – (Laughs) That’s the question I usually avoid. But I’ll tell you what they are. There is a list with 14 or so sectors – advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, publishing, film and video, TV and radio, interactive leisure software, music, performing arts, photography, software and computer services – which most countries have accepted and that are arts based. Now, in my book4, I have added in science and other non-arts based industries, and just writing the book, I’ve become more inclusive. So, although I talk a lot about the creative industries it is because that is the phrase governments understand, that WIPO and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) uses; that everyone deals with. Therefore it is the right phrase.
At the same time, the sort of creativity that I am talking about exists almost everywhere. If I was running a hotel here, in the tourism business, what’s going to make my hotel a success or not is if it delivers the right room at the right price; has customer service, etc. But if it has some edge, some special qualities, where do I go? Do I go to my in-house department guy who is running beverages? Probably not. I’ve got to go to someone who I would call creative. So, I need these creative people. Not out there but in here, in my own business. If I’m developing a pharmaceutical drug or if I’m running a Marina, I need people to think up new ideas about how to differentiate our goods or services from those of others. If I’m running the Marina in the Lake of Geneva over there, I need to work with the boat owners about how to run the best Marina in the world. I can’t do it sitting in my hut wearing my manager’s Marina hat. I’ve got to get out there and talk to my boat owners. We’ve got to work together. The people in this Marina are all probably extremely bright people but the manager is probably not talking to them. He’s probably sitting in his wooden hut making sure they tie up their boats and don’t drown; which is fine and he’ll live to a happy age. But he really won’t make it a really good Marina. So there is a sense in which creativity can apply to anything.
The ‘copyright industries’ consist of all industries that create copyright or related works as their primary product … The ‘patent industries’ consist of all industries that produce or deal in patents … The ‘trademark and design industries’ are even more widespread, and their sheer size and diversity make them less distinctive. Together, these four industries constitute the ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative economy.’ This definition is contentious. While all the definitions so far concur with international practice, there is no consensus on this one.
DG – One should not therefore limit one’s self to specific sectors when identifying the creative industries?
JH – No. Conventional manufacturing and conventional service industries are basically non-creative, but if you apply a creative perspective to the manufacturing and service industries you find something very interesting. I mean cars, for instance, it’s a traditional manufacture, but if you compare the American car industry with the Japanese car industry, one is extremely creative while the other is not. That explains it. Some people are very much focused on traditional notions of creativity, which is actually missing the big picture. My canvas is much broader, much bigger than that. It encompasses all that we are doing. I am keen to make it non-restrictive. I am glad to say that the UK government, which started by restricting creativity to the arts, is now much more open and inclusive.
DG – Did the UK Government not start with cultural heritage?
JH – Yes, but that did not last very long. That was the Conservative government, which held office up to 1997. Labour fastened on to the idea of creative industries around the mid-1990s. They wanted to have a completely new approach to the arts, to the funding of the arts. The then Labour culture secretary, Chris Smith, had this notion that if he talked about the economic benefits of the arts he would get more money from the Treasury. If Chris Smith could say ‘I want £500 million or even £1 billion for the arts creating jobs, creating economic activity, paying taxes, etc.’, the Treasury would say ‘Oh, oh I see, right then. ... so ...’ and that’s what he did. It was clearly a presentational ploy to get more money out of the government, and it was very successful. That was picked up, and everyone said ‘Oh my God, the arts are not only artistically valuable, but they are economically important as well.’ That’s a simple message and we all know that message now. It’s now time to move on.
DG – Do we need a new business model for this Creative Economy?
JH – We do, and I think one is evolving. I wrote in my book about some of the ways in which people run their businesses, and those are still pretty much true. The way in which people run businesses today is much more collaborative, much more open. It’s much more fragmented. And most seem to be working out. I think it’s going to be a long development. It’s not going to happen overnight because it requires changes in schooling, in education, colleges. It requires people to have different attitudes (towards risk and on ways in which they relate to each other.
There is in London, for example, an extraordinary fragmented and diverse and collaborative way of working. So if you have an idea, you’ll find an institution, a body of people, friends who will say ‘that’s fantastic, that’s great’. And that’s the same in half a dozen countries around the world, not more than that. Collaborative works in the context of open source and free software is where it all started but it’s much bigger than that. It’s very important. Take that Marina for example. People who have a sense of responsibility, a budget, and money and management responsibility – if they are sitting by themselves in a corner, they get nowhere, or they get somewhere but very slowly. So they have to work with the talent that is sitting around. It comes back to the beginning that everybody can have an idea. If you bring enough people into it, whether you call them colleagues, or users, or collaborators or customers, or scientists, or whatever, if you bring various people in you will be doing it much faster. There is quite a skill involved in managing people in a team or on a collaborative basis because you want to place everyone based on their individual strengths – “whatever idea you had I really value it” – making them a collaborative unit. There is a difficult balance to make.
The most valuable currency is not money but ideas and intellectual property, which are intangible and highly mobile. The management of creativity puts a premium on entrepreneurial, just-in-time, temporary, ad-hoc working.
DG - Do you agree then on the following ‘industrial economy’ and ‘creative industry’ structures as laid down by the Creative Clusters Ltd.?5 (See Figures 1 and 2)
Figure 1
Figure 2
JH – Yes, I would agree. To my mind, ‘origination’ and ‘production’ are much more blurred, more integrated. In the Industrial Economy Structure (IES), generally speaking, the scientist or the engineer who blew up a blueprint and handed it over to somebody else saying “this is what I want you to do,” that’s what he did. On the other hand, in the Creative Industry Structure (CIS), there is a conversation taking place between equals. The originator will talk to the producer and the producer will talk back to the originator; so it’s much rather circular. ‘Distribution’ is very important. I like the word ‘User’ because increasingly the people sitting in the houses under ‘consumption’ are the same people under ‘origination’. So whereas the IES was about the linear development of a product – from ‘origination’ to ‘consumption’ – the CIS is about a collaborative, sharing process. And whereas in the IES it often happened over many years, because by the time you had your idea under ‘origination’ you had tooled up the machinery, got into mass production, and started the distribution chain; in the CES it could happen very quickly (there are two major exceptions, pharmaceuticals – costing nearly a US$ trillion – and Hollywood films costing over $75m, which have very long time scales).
What happens now is that the people under ‘origination’ are talking (within its circle) and to the people over in ‘consumption’, and these are the users or consumers who are very creative. If you look at the way how free software, or video games or the travel industry are now running themselves, they are totally dependent on instantaneous feedback from these people, the users, and not only in terms of their buying power but because they know on an almost buyer-to-buyer basis. In some of these industries, these people – the users/customers – are saying ‘I have an idea’, and the companies that allows the users to be the originators under ‘origination’, have set up an incredibly effective and rapid supply chain. It used to take years and this now takes days.
DG – Is that because of the information and communication technologies?
JH – Yes. The way in which video games are now developed is because of the people under ‘consumption’, who get a kick out of developing a game, get credit for it. And they’re getting money out of it, including a sense of passion. We’re seeing it now in a lot of industries. So I think the heading, the Industrial Economy can be changed to create the Creative Industrial Economy, where the linear chain has now been replaced in, not all but in many industries, by a circle. For example, ‘origination’ could come out of ‘production’, ‘distribution’ and out of ‘consumption’. Anyone sitting inside production, distribution and consumption is able and increasingly has the power to have the idea that changes this production, distribution and consumption structure.
DG – It’s telling when you suggest that the user, consumer acts as the creator.
JH – It’s the consumer, user and the creator. Obviously, for many things, such as watching television, we are purely passive consumers. When it comes down to the Internet we are a little bit active, and when it comes down to video games we are much more active. Take designs for example, people are playing around with designs. Look at the fashion business and look at Haute Couture. What happens today is that people play around, distributors play around, people on the street play around. They mix and match, and someone here will see someone walking down the street, and say ‘God that’s fantastic, I’ll get that into here.’ Whereas someone sitting in Paris in the 1950s would have looked at people walking down the street and would never have had an idea, would never have thought of using what those people on the street were doing up here. Nowadays, it’s much more circular and it’s very, very quick.
Figure 3: This figure of the ‘Creative Industrial Economy’ is an attempt to visualize John Howkin’s creative economy and structure.
DG – How is the process of getting a creative product to market different from the traditional structure?
JH – Fundamentally, there is a major difference. In the traditional structure it was ‘managed’ by a very small group of static and elitist people. You had to fight to get in there, and you were then subservient to everything else. Whereas now, there is a much larger group of people under ‘origination’, and it’s still very competitive. I always say that the creative industries are very, very competitive. In fact, I think they are the most competitive business there is. It’s not a question of having a few elite people. Anybody who is moderately good can get in there in some way and have fun, and make money. Take Los Angeles and the film business. There are very few successful movies every year that make money, and every studio makes, say half a dozen movies, tops. So several studios that make 35 movies, which is a terribly small number, but sustains a population of two million people. The vast majority of whom have a very high standard of living. There is so much money in that industry. There are the hefty studios and the main agents, main actors, but actually there are also a huge number of other people. Whether you are a would-be actor, or a would-be executive, or whether you want to blow up a boat and make smoke. These people can all make a living out of that and these people are not SMEs. They are individuals. Many governments and UN agencies focus too much on SMEs and tend to ignore the individual. As a result, their statistics give an increasingly false picture of the real world. They have a great life and they’re really skilled, and very competitive, and they earn a lot of money. And that to my mind is almost a model, a microcosm of a creative industry. We should stop having people think only of being the superstars or the really powerful people, or the really successful entrepreneur. If you just do something very, very well, you can have a lot of fun and make a lot of money. But for that you absolutely need a large distribution.
DG – And intellectual property (IP), where does it fit in?
JH – Everybody in the system – everybody – needs to know about IP. It’s not about one person knowing more than the other. IP is the currency, the lifeline. It’s what makes everybody, at the end of the day, make a business out of it and get personal pride out of it. So everybody who is doing a deal, doing a transaction with someone else has got to know about IP. In the old days, the people in production had to know about raw materials and contract law; now they have to know about IP and contract law. And it all has to do with ‘what have I got that I can use as a lever to sell to the other person’.
Intellectual property has become a factor in the global battle for competitive advantage. The effect is seen in almost every industry; not merely the traditional copyright and patent industries (which are expanding) but in all industries that depend upon trademarks, brands and designs, from food to sport. Companies want to maximize revenue from each creative product; and therefore create a many intellectual properties and as many rights as possible. From a company'’ view point, there are many arguments in favour of privatization and few against. An increasing number of creative products have a property tag attached, and the tag says ‘private’.
DG – Can it be done without IP?
JH – No. IP is essential. Contract law is only the envelope for what you want to do. IP is critical.
[But] these intellectual property laws are voluntary in the sense that everyone can create and invent outside the property contract. There are many creative people who do not enter the marketplace at all, and do not sign the contract. They opt out. They do not claim their rights. … There is another group of people whose work is valuable but who refuse financial gain on moral grounds. …And there are others who simply make mistakes.
DG – Finally, a large portion of the creative industries consists of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). How are they to manage and capitalize on their ‘ideas’ and creative products?
JH – What should SMEs do? First point: creativity comes from individuals working in organizations of all sizes from the very small to the very large. So the category of SME doesn’t really catch them. Second point: the critical decision is when to share ideas freely and when to decide to own them. I am working with a successful media company about their software. Question: should they get patents and assert copyright or should they allow their staff and their customers to modify their products? Absolutely critical question: When to possess; when to give away.
DG – Mr. Howkins, thank you for your time.
Epilogue
Intellectual property rights aim at protecting the creative, insightful, unique and inventive creations of the human mind. Once the creators or inventors decide to identify and claim ownership over their value-adding outputs through the operation of relevant legal tools of the intellectual property system of laws, it becomes possible to use and trade such assets in the market place. In the current era of vast amounts of information and knowledge, the importance of the intellectual property, embodied in these creative and inventive assets, has evolved to a point where practically all goods and services rely to varying degrees on the effective use of the tools of the intellectual property system for successful commercialization.
As such creativity and invention become private ‘property,’ which is recognized as being personal and/or owned. That is, while creativity and inventiveness in themselves are universal, the exclusive proprietary rights over intellectual creations, which are inspired by people’s creativity and inventiveness, becomes the domain of binding legal norms and standards concerning property over intellectual creations
It is no coincidence that mainstream media is now touting not just the need to be creative, but the existence of the ‘Creative Economy’. The latest publication on ‘creativity’ comes from the magazine Business Week. In their summer 2005 Special Report dedicated to “Get Creative: How to build Innovative Companies” it states that the “The Knowledge Economy as we know it is being eclipsed by something new -- call it the Creativity Economy. Even as policymakers and pundits wring their hands over the outsourcing of engineering, software writing, accounting, and myriad other high-tech, high-end service jobs -- not to mention the move of manufacturing to Asia -- U.S. companies are evolving to the next level of economic activity.”6
Whether or not we have moved from Theodore Adorno’s notion of the cultural industries, or from the popular concepts of the content industries or copyright-based industries, what is pivotal is that human endeavour and its resulting ‘creations’ begins with creativity. Ones capacity to then exploit such creativity will be the key driver to a competitive and vibrant business community. Along with creativity, intellectual property will fuel modern creative economies.
1 The opinions and views expressed in this interview are solely those of
Mr. John Howkins and should not be attributed to WIPO. Any comments or suggestions pertaining to this interview may be sent to donna.ghelfi@wipo.int.
2 John Howkins is one of today’s leading thinkers on creativity and intellectual property. One of his current projects includes the formulation of an ‘Intellectual Property Charter’, The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), UK.
3 International Institute of Communications http://www.iicom.org/index.htm
4 Advertising, Architecture, Art, Crafts, Design, Fashion, Film, Music, Performing Arts, Publishing, R&D, Software, Toys and Games, TV and Radio, and Video Games. See pg. 116, ‘The Creative Economy’
5 Creative Clusters Ltd. was set up in 2001 to enable people engaged in the development of the creative industries to: Showcase their work; Learn from each other; Identify and articulate policy issues; Connect to development resources. The company is based in the Workstation, Sheffield, U.K. This is a managed workspace for cultural and media businesses in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Quarter. See http://www.creativeclusters.com
6 See ‘Get Creative: How to build innovative companies” http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_31/b3945401.htm.
