Updates
Crisis is always the best opportunity to do something fresh
Dick Penny, Managing Directer of Watershed wrote this article for After the Crunch a 100-page book where 42 artists, entrepreneurs, commentators,analysts, policy-makers, policy-sceptics, academics, financiers – and citizens – set out their hopes and fears for the future:
For an often all too brief period the old metrics do not apply. We have to seize the moment. It might be harder to find the economic capital, but the social capital is hungry for mobilisation in pursuit of new value.
So lets invest with confidence and joy in creative enterprise. Lets invest in diverse ways through producers who are close to the talent. Lets invest for risk and innovation; in hot spots of open collaboration; in networks of interdisciplinary talent. But do not imagine that this can be done through the hierarchy of our established bureaucracies with their leaden metrics, endless schemes, labyrinthine processes, unintelligible application forms, endless reports, officers trained to drain the energy from any idea.
We need to invest to create without seeking to pre-determine the outcome. And please can we ignore the medium of expression and forget categorisations which separate art and creative industry. We have to encourage not control creative energy in the certainty that some of it will create new value: economic, cultural and social.
So I suggest that while the majority try to rebuild the old system driven by return on economic capital we must also encourage the emergence of a new system based on investment of social capital. Innovation in the creative economy is driven by micro businesses developing creative ideas for the power of their creativity rather than the fit with a well researched market. We need diverse players in open networks with responsive support systems which sustain hope, confidence and ambition over extended periods.
We need to focus on our ‘core cities’ to build distinctive groupings of innovation. We need to let go at the centre and see what grows when the margins are set free.
Download the pdf, edited by Tom Bewick, John Holden, John Kieffer, John Newbigin and Shelagh Wright here.