Future of Creative Industries - Implications for Research ... - Europa

industries (…) catch industries which operate essentially outside the cultural sphere but someof those products could be argued to have some degree of cultural content.” These industriescomprise advertising, tourism, architectural and design services (p. 113). The culturalindustries model recognises both the role of subsidised industries and the commercial culturalones, but favours the arts core of the cultural industries.Over time, largely due to the accent placed upon commercial and economic development, themiddle and outside layers were moving to the core and the subsidised sector was pushed atthe periphery, becoming a subset of creative industry policy frameworks (T. O’Regan, 2001,p. 20). Both the subsidized and commercial culture became of interest as creativity resources.Such resources – of people, skills, talent and practice forms – “were to be harnessed,redirected, refashioned via a commercial and entrepreneurial spirit in an ever wideningcommercial application of creativity that involved much more than the existing commercialand subsidized cultural sectors”. The creative industries model considers the culturalindustries within a services framework; and configures culture as a “service industry”and “creativity an application”. (T. O’Regan, 2001, p. 21)An analysis of UNCTAD makes a difference between “upstream activities” (traditionalcultural activities such as performing arts or visual arts) and “downstream activities” (muchcloser to the market like advertising, publishing or media-related activities) and argues thatthe second group “derive their commercial value from low reproduction costs and easytransfer to other economic domains. From this perspective, cultural industries make up asubset of the creative industries, while the even broader cluster copyright industries consist ofboth creative industries and distribution-based industries.” (UNCTAD, 2004, p. 4)Referring to the same shift of terms from cultural to creative industries, Stuart Cunninghamargues that cultural industries notions have been developed around the cultures of nationstates and generally the term “has developed into the application of neoclassical economics tothe art paralleled by a ‘rebadging’ of large, usually commercial industries such as TV, musicand film, as ‘cultural’.” (S. Cunningham, 2001, p. 5) “There are undoubted continuitiesbetween cultural and creative industries, but … creative industries are trying to chart ahistorical shift from subsidised ‘public arts’ and broadcast era media, towards new andbroader applications of creativity… Creative industries are less national, and more globaland local/regional… Their characteristic organisational mode is the micro-firm to small tomedium-sized enterprise (SMEs) relating to large established distribution/circulationorganisations”. (idem, 2001, p. 6)Taking into account all the above arguments, we consider the creative industries as lyingat the crossroads between the arts, business and technology (UNCTAD, 2004) andhaving the cultural industries as a subset (T. O’Reagan, 2001; S. Cunningham, 2001).The creative industries can be defined as “those industries that have their origin inindividual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creationthrough the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (UK Creative IndustriesTask Force, 1997).4