Creative Metropoles research findings to be presented on CEB

On September 9th and 10th Helsinki will become the meeting place for researchers, policy makers, education providers, developers and businessmen ready to examine the role of creativity in the economy and society at the international conference Creative Economy and Beyond (CEB). Representatives from the project Creative Metropoles will participate at the event, present the preliminary findings from the research on creative industries and bring invited companies from creative industry sector for gaining new insights and finding common trends.

Creative Metropoles bring together creative companies for Blender!

Among others, 9 representatives of creative industry from the cities joined in project Creative Metropoles will participate at the networking and experience exchange event Blender! in Helsinki on September 8, 2009. These companies include: 0047, Fused, Konglomeratene, Krejci, Kristjan Mändmaa /Bummi, Studio Mark Braun, Substrakt Limited, Tasty/ creative space, Tuttobene.

Prof. Dr. Dieter Haselbach on Innovation@Creative Industries conference

In a brief text, it is next to impossible to give justice to all the ideas that were exposed during a full conference day. So I want to highlight only a few threads that were going through the debate.

Although one may be critical to Richard Floridas main point that the economy follows creativity it still makes sense to ask, as did Senator Harald Wolf in his opening statement: How can a city foster innovation, how can it foster creativity? This far, Florida is right: Creativity is, indeed, a main source of economic development. The mechanism of growth in a market economy is, as Schumpeter stated as early as 1906, creative destruction, or, the creation of new combinations in the economy.

Innovation@Creative Industries

The high-profile, international conference, "Innovation@Creative Industries" (June 29th, 2009 - Radialsystem V), brought together 350 creative workers, artists and stakeholders from public, private and NGO sectors around Europe. The goal was to reveal the benefits of the booming creative industries and to stimulate their contributions to regions' innovational capacities.

The conference was opened by programmatic background information on the concept and importance of innovation from philosophical, political and industrial view points. It was followed by interactive panel sessions on “Urban Spaces for Innovation” and “Innovation Development” in creative sectors. Various approaches presented and discussed by partner cities from the European project CREATIVE METROPOLES – amongst them Amsterdam, Birmingham, Helsinki, Vilnius and Berlin.

11 European metropoles work together to boost the creative economy

Eleven capital and metropolitan cities of Europe have joined their forces to further foster the development of their creative sectors in an effort to overcome the economic downturn and make their cities more attractive in the global hunt for talent.

“CREATIVE METROPOLES: Public Policies in Support of Creative Industries” has received 2.44 MEUR funding from the INTERREG IVC programme in an effort to make public support systems and instruments more focused, effective and better tailored to the actual needs of the creative industries. It will run until September 2011.

The project is spearheaded by the culture and business development professionals of local governments of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Birmingham, Helsinki, Oslo, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vilnius and Warsaw – cities that play a central role in the economies of their countries. The City of Riga is the project initiator and lead partner of the consortium. This is currently one of the widest pan-European projects addressing this field.