This week, the Creative Industries team at South West Regional Development Agency (where I’m currently working) hosted an event called the South West Creative Summit in Bristol. The event was due to co-ordinate with the launch of the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s Creative Economy Programme, but, as a week in politics goes, it was all change. The expected Green Paper has been delayed until the autumn, but instead a weighty doorstopper tomb called “Staying Ahead: The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries” by Will Hutton and the Work Foundation came out on June 25th – which of course no one (including guest speaker Phil Clapp from DCMS) had read yet.

The report has eight recommendations for developing the UK’s as the leading global hub for Creative Industries. Read a 3-minute potted summary and points. More on this when I’ve read the tomb myself, currently guiltily sitting on my desk. It’ll be interesting to see how much is taken into the Green Paper (a discussion proposal), which is rumoured will never become a White Paper (policy recommendation) – but at least we’ve had a good debate about our own vision for the creative industries in the meantime.

The other change of player was the throning of Gordon Brown as PM on 27th June – which gave an interesting slant to the preceedings and, in my mind, asks more questions about how long Creative Industries will be a key priority for government – the new broom and all that. Still, Hutton’s report claims that the UK Creative Industries are as important to the economy as the finance sector, clearly talking the former-Chancellor’s language.

So against this backdrop, 150 delegates, mainly from the South West region’s public sector partners, with some leading business directors, met up to get all ‘gun-ho’ about the potential for the creative economy of the region. A number of the partners had been curious/confused about what the event’s purpose was. Assuming the main target was impressing the powers-that-be at the Development Agency itself (with speeches by its Chief Executive, Jane Henderson, and Chair, Juliet Williams) – the event was a tour-de-force. Secondly, it was an opportunity to draw together all the partners to think about strengthening and morale building ‘Team South West’ and putting this ‘weird shaped’ (to quote Tom Fleming) region on the map, and to celebrate was The Guardian have called ‘the cool, creative South West’.

The night before, a welcome reception was held at the sumptous surroundings of the Royal West of England Academy, where 50 years of the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol were celebrated, with speeches by department head Neil Nightingale (yes, really!) and its co-founder and first producer Tony Soper. Through their anecdotes and an impressive showreel, it was amazing to see how much the wildlife film industry had changed since the 1950s when novice nature enthusiasts took out camera to shoot hours of grainy black and white footage. Now, shows for international audiences like Planet Earth, are produced for a multi-platform, multi-media world (with multi-million pound budgets!) with the latest cutting-edge technologies, making images that would have been unthinkable in 1957. As Bristol is home to 25% of the world’s natural history tv output, and significant events like Wildscreen Festival and ARKive (education archive), it shouldn’t be underestimated how such a significant ‘hub’ can have an impact on Bristol – both in terms of influencing content and themes, creating spin-out companies, and the use of digital technology in TV production.

The main day featured many impressive keynote speakers:

David Kester (Director of the Design Council) told us South West businesses invested above the average in design, with 70% using design for communications, and 40% for digital. Prince Albert had a vision for the Great Exhibition, linking the superb Victorian designers with manufacturing. The Design Council’s Designing Demand programme seeks to build these links to teach business how to maximise on design. Today, the design industry employs 185,000 people and contributes £11.5 billion to the UK economy. 90% of the environmental impact of a product is determined at design stage, so creativity can have an impact on both sustainability and productivity.

Andrew Curry (Director of the Henley Centre HeadlightVision) showed us a vision of the coming shape of the creative economy. In the 1980s, media was about consumption, in the 1990s it was about choice, and in the noughties it’s about creation. There are new means of exploring content through digital media and the media itself is becoming more valueless – Metro is the fastest growing international newspaper and it’s given away free.

What futorologist Alvin Toffler in 1980 called the ‘prosumer’ is now User-Generated Content. According to the 1999 book The Cluetrain Manifesto, Markets are now ‘conversations’ between society, business and consumers. Curry showed us the errors of putting the brand in the hands of the consumer to mash-up via a misguided Chevy Tahoe advert. The gas-guzzling superbrand’s open platform became a protesting environmentalists’ wet dream.

Web 1.0 was about connecting desktop to desktop, Web 2.0 browser to browser, and Web 3.0 connecting the virtual with the physical. ‘Fan fiction’ – engaging before, after and during the event (most significantly through TV web forums) – fan responses, mash-ups and parodies will become more commonplace, which will have implications for copyright and ownership for brand and content owners. If you ‘ban’ fan fiction, you will alienate your audience. Andrew showed us a fab Harry Potter, parody video – ‘the mysterious ticking noise‘.

Anthony Lilley (Chief Executive, Magic Lantern Productions) talked about when public service meets interactive media. Today, a 14-year-old doesn’t know a world without internet, tv without remote controls, or a world without console games. Second Life has 25,000 users in it at one time, which isn’t yet a force for change but is a useful ‘focus group’ for testing ideas. The drivers for change are choice, control, conversations, community (and anything else beginning with c). Innovators needs to build risk into the start of production – quality is better than meeting delivery deadlines (Windows Vista case in point) and work out how to measure impacts not outputs.

Jane Henderson (Chief Executive of South West RDA), presented her vision for ‘changing the world a bit by changing this bit of the world’. Overall, emphasing how commited the Agency is to supporting the infrastructure and change needed to grow the South West’s creative industries, even though it challenges the usual government ways of working. (At this point, I realised my efforts to ’sex up’ her speech may have not quite hit the mark. ‘Hot Fuzz’s post-modern mash up’ may have sounded better on paper!).

Chris Powell (Chair of NESTA) rounded of the keynote speeches. Although the UK ’s creative industries employs 1 million directly and 800,000 creative people are within non-creative businesses, the weakness is that their growth links to the overall strength of the economy – in good times, people buy creativity, in bad times they don’t, so the industry can yo-yo. The iPod is 4% design and manufacture, and 96% experiential. Creative industries sell experiences and lifestyle, but every other country in the world now see them as a key to their success and think they are good at it too, so our global competition is fierce!

The Afternoon was taken by workshop sessions on creative places, knowledge transfer, skills, new markets, and digital media, for which there are some interesting supporting papers online and some summaries to follow (when I pull my finger out )

Finally, Nick Capaldi (Chief Executive of Arts Council England, South West) roused and caroused the ‘pledges’ from all partners and businesses as to what they would contribute to the region’s creative economy. Most were generic rather than specific or transformational, but it was a good means of drawing the spirit of everyone together among the collective branding and vision of the event – ‘create, engage, transform’.