Articles

Talk about where the data came from....how you selected it.

I started with these questions: "How do we quantify the creative
industry in Tacoma?" "How many employers are there?" "How many
employees?" "What categories of businesses fall within the creative
industry?" Finding acceptably accurate data on employment is
challenging. We decided to use reports available through Americans for
the Arts: http://bit.ly/NSkyi.

The reports use Dun and Bradstreet data and include a summary table
listing the number of arts-related businesses and employment.

We ordered the reports from Americans for the Arts, but learned that
they are not currently available. We had to go in a different
direction.

We decided to use the definition of creative industries from Americans
for the Arts: http://bit.ly/zFBeY.

The definition lists the SIC codes of creative industries. We used
these SIC codes to extract creative industries from a 2008 InfoUSA
table of businesses in Tacoma.

Our arts administrator then went through each of the 700+ records and
marked the ones that were, in fact, creative industries (and still
operating). We called this the InfoUSA list. The data visualization on
Many Eyes (http://bit.ly/100FZP) is the InfoUSA list.

The arts administrator also skimmed the entire InfoUSA table to find
SIC descriptions of creative industries that were not in the Americans
for the Arts definition. I extracted records by these codes and added
them to the InfoUSA list.

The arts administrator found that many artists were not in the InfoUSA
data, so she started a new list that includes mostly self-employed
painters, writers, bands, galleries, etc. We called this the local
knowledge list.

What did we learn? We learned that commonly used datasets like InfoUSA
leave out many artists. Americans for the Arts came to the same
conclusion about Dun and Bradstreet data: "... many individual artists
are not included, as not all are employed by a business" (Online
source: http://www.artsusa.org/information_services/research/services/creativ...,
accessed 4/10/09).

We will put the two lists side by side to show the undercounting of
creative industries in commonly used datasets (Dun and Bradstreet,
InfoUSA). We will combine the InfoUSA list and the local knowledge
list to paint a more accurate picture of creative industries in
Tacoma.

Michael

On Apr 9, 3:01 pm, "Chris Gibbons" <cgibb...@littletongov.org> wrote:

Michael:

A little background on the creative industries might be helpful.

Guided by thought leaders like Charles Landry (The Creative City: http://snurl.com/fnhq4
   [www_amazon_com] ), the Blair government in the UK introduced the  
concept of creative industry clusters as a part of a strategic  
framework for economic development. That was about 1996 or 1997, I  
recall.

The early work might still be available on the UK government web site,  
but the current incarnation of the effort can be found here: http://www.creativeclusters.com/

The UK government's work spawned a number of local efforts in the UK,  
like Creative Edinburgh (http://www.creativedinburgh.co.uk/) in 2003  
and Creative London: (http://snurl.com/fnib5) in 2004.

Now the creative industries are part of a number of cities across the  
globe from Wellington (http://snurl.com/fni1s) to Vienna (http://snurl.com/fnimj
) Frankfurt (http://snurl.com/fnirk).Hong Kong recently announced a  
major push in  this direction: (http://snurl.com/fnj31)

In the US, the move toward pushing the creative industries started,  
not with Richard Florida, but with the New England Foundation for the  
Arts (http://snurl.com/fnj6t) In 2000, the NEFA released a report  
specifically connecting the creative industries with the region's  
competitiveness. (In traditional economic development creative  
industries are often relegated to "lifestyle" amenities.) Read more  
here: http://snurl.com/fnjc0

Florida published his book, The Creative Class, in 2002. Sadly,  
Richard did not give readers much background on what had been going on  
in the UK, the work of the NEFA, or the work of Charles Landry, who  
has pioneered much of the practical application of this concept. (I  
recommend his book.)

Florida's three T's formulation -- talent, tolerance, and (I forget  
the third one) -- reduces the sophistication of a creative industries  
strategy to a virtually useless bumper sticker. Nevertheless, people  
like my colleague George Robertson tried out some of Florida's ideas.  
George used the focus on tolerance to launch a strategy to attract  
Guyanese immigrants to Schenectady. (http://snurl.com/fnju6)

As you can see, I'm not a big fan of Florida's work. While he  
publicized the opportunities of focusing on creative people, his work  
does not offer much practical direction.

The deeper flow of helpful critical thinking comes out of the Europe--
NEFA linkages. So, if you are heading in this direction, I recommend  
Landry as a starting point.

By now, the focus on creative industries is taking hold in the U.S. We  
are still five to seven years behind what's been happening in the EU.  
This year, for example, the EU launched the European Year of  
Creativity and Innovation: http://create2009.europa.eu/

It seems that still outside the US, the connections between creativity  
and innovation are more explicitly drawn. See, for example, the  
Institute for Creeative Industries and Innovation in Australia:  (http://www.ici.qut.edu.au/
)

A focus on creative clusters has also taken hold in places like Rhode  
Island (   ) (Rhode Island School of Design) and Savannah: The  
Creative Coast ( http://www.thecreativecoast.org/)  (Savannah College  
of Art and Design) and Charleston (http://snurl.com/fnkmu ) (Spoleto)  
 > an interesting experiment is underway at Ball State University to  
establish a nationally prominent center for digital media design in  
the hopes of sparking new business development. (As the director of  
the center has said, "Hollywood is rebooting.") (http://snurl.com/
fnl23 )

Vermont has pioneered applying these frameworks to rural communities. http://snurl.com/fnkb2
  This strategy is taking hold in rural economies like Western  
Massachusetts (The Berkshire Creative Economy Project). Other places,  
like North Central Arkansas are beginning to explore the option. (http://snurl.com/fnl3t
  )

Last year, Fairfax County in Northern Virginia put a stake in the  
ground to be a center of creative industries in the US with its  
Creative Economy web site and symposium: http://www.e-country.org/creative.htm

The Triad region of North Carolina, following the recommendations of  
consultant Angeles Angelou, has placed a big bet on the creative  
industries. Not to be outdone by Northern Virginia, they  recently  
announced a National Creativity Symposium: http://snurl.com/fnlgc

So there you have it: a brief road map of the emerging connection  
between the creative industries and economic development. As you may  
be able to tell, I think its a big opportunity.

In my view, focusing on the creative industries represents a good  
setting for applying the tools, insights, and strategies of Economic  
Gardening.

Ed

On Apr 11, 2009, at 12:47 AM, MStoddard wrote:

Great summary on the creative economy--thanks much for passing this
on. I read the policy briefing papers by the Obama campaign on the
arts (put out in Sept. 2008), which included a good deal of
information about the relationship between the arts, innovation, and
the economy. I can't find the actual document on the Web at this
point, but if anyone is interested, I'd be glad to email the PDF file.

A decade ago there was a flurry of activity around the relationship of
the arts and academic achievement. A research review done by Project
Zero at Harvard (Reviewing Education and the Art Project--REAP) in
2000, http://www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/Reap/REAPExecSum.htm,
revealed that while there were a few causal links between specific
artistic endeavors (listening to and playing music; drama in the
classroom), the majority of studies showed no causal effects between
arts education and improvement in test scores or academic achievement.
One of the conclusions reached by the authors was that it is dangerous
to justify arts education in terms of instrumentality, i.e.,
secondary, non-arts effects: "We must not allow policy makers to
justify (or reject) the arts based on their alleged power to transfer
to academic subject matters."

I agree with Ed that there is tremendous potential in focusing on the
creative industries through economic gardening programs. Perhaps we
need to be careful in our economic development practices not fall into
the same instrumentality trap--while the creative industries very well
may produce economic benefits, the arts should be supported for their
intrinsic value to society. I suppose I am biased, being married to an
artist and art educator!

Great post!

Christine

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I found at the ED levels I was unique (B.A. Art, painter, graphic
designer, illustrator, calligrapher who'd partnered with rock bands,
music producers, recording studios, concert promoters, talent agents,
and assisted all manner of craftspeople and artists especially back in
the 1980's actually running a creative incubator before we knew the
term.)
A. Jobs in the arts are mostly self-employment, precarious, and
generally subsidized by other jobs, spouses' income and health
insurance, parents and inheritances, and migrate to where there's
cheap housing and workspace more than where there are markets.   When
you look at the sum total of the glamorous industries:  Films, TV,
Recorded Music, Live Performance, Paintings, Prints, High Fashion,
Custom Jewelry-making, Fiction, Book Publishing, Live Theater, etc.
they all turn out to be far smaller in dollars, employment, firm size,
etc. than one would expect.   Most industries are larger, pay better,
pay more taxes, contribute more surplus than rely on surplus, etc.
which makes targeting these for ED resources a reflection more of
their glamour to shallow-thinking politicians who'd rather rub
shoulders with a movie star than see a new portland cement plant whose
taxes will pay for a dozen additional police officers for decades.
Heck, the "Angel Investor" was the bored rich man or heir who liked
hanging out in the theater district and investing in new plays both to
have something more interesting to talk about at parties and to meet
"fast women" as actresses were stereotyped at the time..."Dagwood" of
the comic strip starts out as one of those ("Blondie" was a
golddigging showgirl) who ends up disinherited for marrying one
instead of just dallying with them...Mel Brooks "The Producers" says
more about real capital formation too.

B. Florida confuses people who CONSUME the arts with the producers.
Like mistaking people who wear high fashion clothing with people who
make high fashion clothing.  I've known hundreds of real artists and
the ones who sat around in downtown cafes in expensive districts were
the least serious ones, poseurs would be a more accurate description
than individual engines of economic growth.

C. Working with small manufacturers and craftspeople, who are
typically left out of these definitions and often disparaged quite
unfairly,  I gradually noticed how phenomenally creative (in the real
sense of making new patterns out of old bits and pieces) they were on
a daily basis while a great many in the arts create little or nothing
new, repeating old established material is reliably more profitable
and easier.  Is a musician playing a Bach composition, a painter doing
one more landscape, a theater company mounting an Arthur Miller play
breaking new ground or simply tweaking someone else's creative work?

D.  There's always been a strong link to where creative clusters are
active to where there's a rapidly growing upper middle class and
general prosperity so new patrons are emerging without existing
preferences and relationships...going back at least 2,300 years as
Peter Hall clearly shows in his magnificent book "Cities &
Civilization" which I highly recommend to anyone thinking about cities
and economic development, let alone his insights in creativity that
matters (i.e. affect world tastes for generations rather than
entertains someone for an hour.)

E.  As the public schools and universities mostly work against
creative thinking in all fields since it's so disruptive as Clayton
Christenson would observe, same with arts organizations from the Les
Ecoles des Beaux Arts that tried to stifle just about all of the
French art innovators of the 19th Century (Impressionists, Post-
Impressionists) or the Third Reich's dismay at the Bauhaus
movement...say, Hitler was a painter, Mussolini a journalist, Albert
Speer an architect,  institutionalizing creative cluster support is
almost certainly counterproductive for getting more than trivial
creativity advances.   So an organized effort at Florida talks about
most likely stifles rather than stimulates as history indicates in
many places and times (look at the rigid conventions that bound
Japanese art for centuries.)

F. MIT's course on how to make/invent things, written about by it's
instructor in the book "Fab" talks about how to stimulate and assist
creativity in what matters for economic developers.  The National
Business Incubators Assoc. has an excellent guide to incubating the
arts in it's bookstore and really, getting a bunch of people together
frequently to brainstorm from very different viewpoints, backgrounds,
and interests to cross-fertilize each others' thinking and tools is
the soul of incubation and extremely productive.  Look at the Royal
Society of London (Isaac Newton, not the aristocrats), Franklin's
Junto Society in Philadelphia, Royal Geographic Society, Bauhaus in
Berlin, DaVinci's studio in Florence, the Springfield Armory in Mass.,
Detroit in the early days, Wall Street (where stupid people get too
creative), the Texas oilfields, Cape Canaveral and the Johnson Space
Center, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center of the 1970's, MIT,
Stanford, Harvard, U Cal Berkeley...

G. Two other fun ones are "Greatness" by Dean Keith Simonton and
"Talent is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin with all sorts of surprising
research on creativity, high performance, nurturing ability,
etc...     A key finding for great accomplishment in the arts was
clinical depression bouts over a lifetime so maybe Wall Street is our
best ally in achieving that part of the mix.

Al Jones
reads too much, knows too many people, only thinks in the shower or
while shaving, thinks Ed, Christian, and Christine are right just
about all of the time. :-)

On Apr 10, 5:23 pm, Ed Morrison <edmorri...@earthlink.net> wrote:

read more »

Jack Schultz
www.twitter.com/jackschultz

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Green Acres--ND vs SF
I was in North Dakota yesterday at the Governor's annual rural ED conference in Bismarck. It was my 14th talk in the state over the past four years. I've travelled thousands of miles through the state and have constantly found North Dakotans to be some of the friendliest people on the face of the earth. I was thrilled to be back.

As I was driving from Fargo to Bismarck the chorus to the Green Acres theme song kept rolling around in my head. Do you remember that show?

Green Acres is the place to be

Farm Livin' is the life for me
Land spreadin' out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan...just give me that countryside

So, which would you take, ND or Manhattan? Since we're in the midst of the Democratic Convention, I decided to compare it to Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco. SF has been cited by numerous pundits and writers (Richard Florida probably being the most vocal) as the ideal city of the future.

The populations of ND and SF are somewhat similar. SF has 764,976 residents. ND 639,715. SF has a much higher household income at $57,476 compared to ND's $40,818, but beyond that one stat, virtually every other stat that I looked at showed ND similar to or superior to SF.

Both SF & ND lost population from 2000 to 2007. SF 1.5%. ND 0.4%.

Both have had a negative outward domestic migration in the past year. SF -1,112. ND -1,136.
The medium age in SF is 39.6 years compared to 37.2 years in ND. USA average is 36.4.

When it comes to families, only 44% of households in SF are married with children compared to 64.6% in ND. USA average is 68.1%. SF has one of the lowest school age populations in the country with only 9.4% in the 5 to 17 age group. ND is at 16.6%. USA is 17.8%.

In 2000, SF had 611,674 jobs. By 2007 the city lost 16% of its jobs, taking it down to 556,621. ND during the same period grew their jobs by 11% from 309,127 to 341,704.

Home ownership is really lopsided! Only 33.3% in SF own their own house vs. 59.1% in ND. USA average is 60.2%. In the past twelve months there were 799 single family housing permits issued in SF compared to 1,919 in the three MSAs in ND (Bismarck, Fargo and Grand Forks). With a medium housing cost of $799,000 in SF, the average job holder will spend 94% of their income on housing! In ND, it will cost you 24 to 28% for that $135,000 medium priced home.

And, how about the much higher household income in SF? They'll need it! A $100,000 income in SF will buy you what $53,991 will in Fargo, ND. Groceries are 27% less expensive in Fargo, as is housing at 71%, utilities at 18%, transportation at 17% and healthcare at 18%. All are less expensive in Fargo!

Where would you rather raise a young family?

Just give me that countryside!

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