CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

The phrase creative industries (or sometimes creative economy) refers to a set of interlocking industry sectors that focus on creating unique property, content or design that previously did not exist. Economic contributions from creative industries have been increasing, particularly as manufacturing industries have become increasingly automated and process-driven. The economic contributions are often cited as being a growing part of the global economy.

Creative industries typically include industries that focus on: creating and exploiting intellectual property products such as music, books, film and games; or providing business-to-business creative services including advertising, public relations and direct marketing. Aesthetic live-performance experiences are also generally included, which contributes to an overlap with definitions of art and culture, and even aspects of tourism and sport. Economic activities focussed on designing, making and selling objects or works of art such as jewellery, haute couture, books of poetry and other creative writing, and fine art are often included in the sector because the value of such objects derives from a high degree of aesthetic originality.

Creative industries exclude, and contrast with, industries that derive value by transferring ownership of pre-existing property (such as retail, financial-services and real-estate industries), by making a commoditised product or service (such as auto-manufacturing and electric-utility industries), and by maintaining or enhancing what already exists (such as the auto-repair industry).

How creative workers are counted : - The DCMS classifies enterprises and occupations as creative according to what the enterprise primarily produces, and what the worker primarily does. Thus, a company which produces records would be classified as belonging to the music industrial sector, and a worker who plays piano would be classified as a musician.

The primary purpose of this is to quantify - for example it can be used to count the number of firms, and the number of workers, creatively employed in any given location, and hence to identify places with particularly high concentrations of creative activities.

It leads to some complications which are not immediately obvious. For example, a security guard working for a music company would be classified as a creative employee, although not as creatively occupied.

The total number of creative employees is then calculated as the sum of:

* all workers employed in creative industries, whether or not creatively occupied (eg all musicians, security guards, cleaners, accountants, managers, etc working for a record company)

* all workers that are creatively occupied, and are not employed in creative industries (for example, a piano teacher in a school). This includes people whose second job is creative, for example somebody who does weekend gigs, writes books, or produces artwork in her spare time