The process of creativity is not new. Having ideas and putting those ideas into form is possibly what makes humans, human and separates us from the rest of the inhabitants of this planet.
However, in order to put things in place that can effectively stimulate a creative economy it is important to have a very good understanding of the needs and motivations of creative people, creative companies and their customers.
The first and most important thing to understand however is that the creative world is a highly dynamic, adaptive and evolving one. There are no set formulas for guaranteeing success and no rules that probably won’t be thrown out as soon as a better one comes along. Any explanation here is by necessity crude and over simplified. When it comes to understanding creative business, there is no substitute for experience although such experience cannot be relied upon to accurately predict outcomes and can even be a constraint to accepting new ideas and methods.
Many creative people have a driving need to be creative. It is simply something they must do. It is often not motivated by a desire to be wealthy or even widely recognised but is frequently accompanied by a strong wish to be able to make enough money out of the creative activity so as to enable the full time immersion in the act of creativity. Herein lies a basic problem. Very often, the talents connected with being highly creative are not well balanced by business or financial acumen. Creative people often need access to skilled business people with a good understanding of creativity and the needs and motivations of creative people.
Any successful creative economy must first bring these two separate skill sets together. Although digital media is extremely effective in allowing people to work from less centralised locations, it cannot substitute for face to face interaction when it comes to business management, job production and client liaison. Producer/managers and creative people must share the same working environment for at least some of the time to be effective, especially during early business start-up stages. One of the advantages of an established economic region with a large number of creative businesses is the proximity of a number of competent business people. Creative businesses are often quick to start and end and also very often employ short term producers for specific projects and jobs. This results in a pool of experienced producer managers who are usually flexible and have sufficient entrepreneurial skills to turn their hands to new ventures over a wide variety of creative disciplines.
A successful creative economy must be able to attract and, if necessary, offer training for competent producer managers.
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