Interesting piece, The Measure of Creativity, by Huib Schippers in The Australian explores the role and measurement of creativity and arts in the Australian economy. Here are a few selections,
“The arts are hardly a fringe sector. Cultural industries (as they have been effectively promoted by the Queensland University of Technology) are increasingly taken into account in policies at all levels, especially since the publication of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (hyped, but not entirely without merit). For music alone, the Music Council of Australia estimates a total annual turnover of more than $7 billion, or 0.75 per cent of gross domestic product. This means that if we all decided to stop learning, playing and listening to music for a year, the entire country would slide into recession.”
“But we also have much to bring to research in other disciplines, which increasingly acknowledge creativity as a key force, and often find contemporary, digital or web-based research outputs more appropriate than paper-based ones. Integration of image, sound and text is becoming the norm in an increasing number of innovative research projects and doctoral submissions, and not only in the arts. Research outputs on DVD-ROMs or wikis are rapidly gaining ground.
At worst, these new formats take advantage of a lack of an established tradition of academic rigour; at best, they integrate image, sound and words into inspiring narratives and convincing arguments, leading to significant insights into creative processes and their relationship to the outside world.”
