Summary: The creative industries refers to a range of economic activities which are concerned with the generation or exploitation of knowledge and information. They may variously also be referred to as the cultural industries (especially in Europe (Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 14)) or the creative economy (Howkins 2001).

Howkins’ creative economy comprises advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software, toys and games, TV and radio, and video games (Howkins 2001, p. 88-117). There remain, however, different definitions of the sector (Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 12)(DCMS 2006).

The creative industries have been seen to become increasingly important to economic well-being, proponents suggesting that “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource,” (Florida 2002, p. xiii) and that “the industries of the twenty-first century will depend increasingly on the generation of knowledge through creativity and innovation,” (Landry & Bianchini 1995, p. 4).

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Adam Smith, the arch-capitalist, didn’t like corporations. He wrote in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations that they breed ”negligence and profusion” and ”scarce ever fail to do more harm than good.” In his day, governments handed out corporate charters rarely and grudgingly. But a century later, as the required scale of enterprise grew, corporations came to the fore. They built railroads, steel mills, refineries, and other businesses of unprecedented size. In so doing, they played an indispensable role in what University of California at Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong calls the ”central fact” in 20th century economic history: the greatest increase in material wealth ever.

Now the Industrial Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy, and corporations are at another crossroads. Attributes that made them ideal for the 20th century could cripple them in the 21st. So they will have to change, dramatically. The Darwinian struggle of daily business will be won by the people–and the organizations– that adapt most successfully to the new world that is unfolding…

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Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism

In early 2006 the term Creative Industries (CI) pops up in the mailboxes and mailing lists of many cultural workers, artists, activists and researchers across Europe, as well as in the calls for seminars and events. An old question spins back: curiously, for the first time, a term is picked up from institutional jargon and brought unchanged into alt culture, used so far to debate other keywords (that may deserve an acronym as well!) and other post-structures like network culture (NC), knowledge economy (KE), immaterial labour (IL), general intellect (GI) and of course Free Software (FS), Creative Commons (CC) etc. The original 1998 definition adopted by the Creative Industries Task Force set up by Tony Blair stated: “Those industries that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”. As you can see, social creativity remains largely left out of that definition: after many years Tony Blair is still stealing your ideas. Let’s try to do another backstory.

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Optional: Creative Economy

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