First day at C&binet and an impressive set up in a posh hotel. Lots of familiar faces and I get to meet some of the other Young Creative Interactive Entrepreneurs who I'll be travelling to India with on Wednesday.

Jenni Russell welcomes the audience with the background to what aims to be a Davos style conference designed to help the creative industries speak with one voice. She asks us to "share and discuss problems to come up with innovative solutions".

Led by Stryker McGuire, contributing editor, Newsweek, the first session features the Rt Hon Ben Bradshaw MP, Phil Redmond and David Rowan, editor, Wired (UK) and goes straight into tackling the recession. By definition are creative industries better at getting out of recession? Phil Redmond thinks so, pointing to the changing business models of creatives who want to sell directly to consumers. Creatives aren't worried about disintermediation, they are enabled by technology.

Stryker wonders if the people in this room worry that DCMS's budget is likely to get cut in the next few years? Ben Bradshaw gives a polite and political answer, explaining that government investment is about enabling the best talent to come through (but watch who you vote for, folks).

Staying on Government - do creative entrepreneurs have access to lobby government? David Rowan talks about the shining stars of the interactive world who may be working in small teams, driven by the desire to create beautiful/useful things but who don't have same lobbying power as the industry giants of the music/broadcast world. Taking the part of the optimist, he praises the UK's fashion and art but makes a plea, in a culture of openness, for open-source government networks and data. For the government to set an example and allow the creative world to find uses for it.

Some advice from the panel:

David: 

Inform yourself as widely as possible, you need to be as conversant in neueroscience as digital. 

Move on from fighting the old battles (of copyright) and look for new solutions.

Phil:

Ask why not rather than why.

Enable the conditions for creativity to fly.

A scene-setting session with some nice sound bites, but there seems to be a mediated twitter stream under the live feed and screens. As @nicoleyershon points out, think this might be missing the point of social media.