Yesterday I was down at the Creativity and Creative Sectors, Clusters and Networks event at the Birmingham University Business School. Here’s the gist of what was learned on the national level:-

There has been a semantic shift at the DCMS is the past year; ‘creative industries’ is now “the creative economy”. ‘Clusters’ will be termed “markets” where possible.

When a senior consultant and researcher was looking for statistics at a regional level, he found it’s “unbelievably confusing when working at a regional level” … “it’s a mess”. On national statistics about the creative industries, the research is still very poorly done but “the DCMS is still spraying this information all over the place” while being fully aware that the data is misleading or plain wrong. The data is “incoherent … we are building a policy that is completely unreliable”.

At the policy level, there is very little contact with practitioner organisations; in terms of defining definitional/industry boundaries for data collection on the creative economy. Our creative exports are still desperately under-performing when judged against their potential.

You don’t need many hardcore creatives in a firm, to spin off lots of jobs around what those creatives are doing or making.

The DCMS is “thinking about” reducing the number of cultural agencies that they fund, thus effectively setting the scene for reducing state intervention in matters of aesthetic judgement.

A recent study of creative fashion businesses in the north-west found that only around 12 to 17 percent of these businesses had had any support from any state organisation.

A new DCMS strategy document should be available in the new year, which will have in it data drawn from an analysis using the revised (i.e.: creative industries -friendlier) SIC/SOC codes, and also data from National Insurance records, to try to determine the scale and location of the creative economy.