Creative industries - theory and practice

Today I have been at the University of Birmingham's Business School. I was attending a seminar Creativity and the Creative Value Chain. Anyway turns out it was an extremely interesting day with lots of food for thought with speakers from across the UK. Some highlights for me:

Defining the creative industries - this is a troublesome area - and some in-depth critique on the issues of, for example, lumping a bunch of 'sub-secotors together were discussed. This is something I've written about previously. There was some quite serious suggestions that the reasons for the particular UK definitions and inclusion of some sub-secotors, over others, might be a little more cynical than one might hope.

Some interesting work testing out Richard Florida's theories of what makes a creative city - an interesting UK map with creativity levels illustrated in increasingly darker shades of blue: Birmingham quite dark blue, Solihull quite dark, Sandwell positively anaemic.

I was joined by several colleagues from my university, some of whom were speaking in the second half of the day (I was not on this occasion). I was struck , pleasantly, by what I realise is a bit of a characteristic of my own place of work. You see what was evident is that we are pretty industry facing - the three presentations by colleagues were all about how they and the respective projects they represent engage with, support and work in collaboration with the local and regional creative industries sector. It was great to hear this practical stuff to put all the earlier theoretical stuff into context. Very interesting.