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White Paper: Harnessing the Power of a Knowledge-Based, Technology-Driven Economy
The Creative Compact: An Economic and Social Agenda for the Creative Age
Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and one of the world's leading social theorists and public intellectuals, believes that human creativity is the engine of economic growth. In this final installment of Professor Richard Florida’s Creative Compact, Florida concludes his argument for a new social compact that will ensure our future economic success. Florida reasons that although the United States faces real security issues, it is imperative that we maintain an open society. Florida concludes that the United States must take the lead is forging a Global Creativity Initiative that would focus on developing new approaches to investing in people.
Professor Florida is a keynote speaker at the National Conference on the Creative Economy, hosted by Fairfax County, October 24-25, 2007, where he will present his latest thinking on how the Creative Economy will affect companies and communities. To register for the conference, visit this link.
[Principle 1: Every Human Being is Creative, Principle 2: Encourage Entrepreneurship Across the Board, Principle 3: Expand Innovation, Principle 4: A Social Agenda for Creativity, Principle 5: Restructure Education for Creativity, Principle 6: The University as Creative Hub, Principle 7: Make Every Community a Creative Community, Principle 8: Leverage the Local]
In the spirit of engaging a broader conversation about the need for a new social and economic agenda, I offer here 10 core principles around which to base a new Creative Compact. I fully realize that such a compact in tune with the demands of the Creative Age can never be a top-down plan; it must emerge organically from the insights, efforts, and energies of varied groups of people and organizations. The 10 principles I offer here are intended as just the starting point of this much-needed national and global conversation.
Principle 1: Every Human Being is Creative
The first principle is as simple as it is obvious: The United States must strive to tap the full creative capabilities of every single human being. The creative class is doing well, and taking care of itself. More effectively harnessing the creative energies of the 30 percent of the American workforce employed in this class is important, but it won't be enough. To both prevent widespread social unrest and benefit economically from the creative input of the maximum number of its citizens, the U.S. will have to find ways to bring the service and manufacturing sectors more fully into the creative age.
In this respect, our greatest challenge involves both the growing class divide that the creative age is producing and the huge reservoir of untapped creative capital that is being squandered. Addressing this divide is not only socially and morally just; it is an economic
imperative for any society interested in long-term innovation and prosperity.
We need to expand the purview of the creative economy – to massively augment the numbers of people who participate in it and benefit from it. During the Great Depression and New Deal, the United States succeeded in turning a huge number of formerly low-skill, lowpaying, blue-collar occupations into the kind of jobs that could support working class families and become the launch pad for upward mobility. We did that for a good reason: Those were the growth jobs of the industrial age. But today - painful as it is for the people who lose them - those jobs are declining, and they have been declining for four or five decades.
We are, however, seeing the dramatic rise of two kinds of jobs: high-paying, high-skilled jobs in the creative sector and much lower paying, lower-skill jobs in the service sector. As I have said before it is not enough to prime the pump of the creative sector. Just as we improved manufacturing jobs some 70 years ago, we must act to improve the pay, content and working conditions of the second great source of jobs in today's economy - service sector jobs - the port-of-entry jobs to the creative economy. Leading service sector companies - Best Buy, Whole Foods, Starbucks, Target, and many others - are already improving their wages and working conditions; some are even trying to more explicitly tap the creative capabilities of their workforce to engage customers and improve efficiency.
We need to find ways to leverage and expand these efforts, perhaps analogously to the spread of quality management in industry. What’s more, personal service industries that require close physical proximity are practically impervious to outsourcing. It’s hard to have your hair cut by someone in Bangalore. These jobs are immensely rewarding from a personal creativity standpoint, too, and provide further opportunities for those who hold them to utilize the human creativity inherent in all of us.
As a nation, we need to call a Service Economy Summit as soon as possible to learn about best-practice trends, support and expand these best-practice efforts, and ultimately dramatically improve wages and working conditions in this integral and fast-growing segment of the economy. In this way, we can better utilize talent and also to increase the demand for and market for creative opportunities.
Principle 2: Encourage Entrepreneurship Across the Board
The industrial economy was organized around large firms. The creative economy is organized a mix of firm-sizes, high-rates of mobility and dynamic firm formation. Our efforts to date to support entrepreneurship have focused on technology and private firms. We need to extend this all segments of the economy - from arts, design, and culture to the service economy - giving every American, young and old, rich and poor, the tools needed to survive and succeed as entrepreneurs.
Principle 3: Expand Innovation
Investing in innovation and in our collective creative infrastructure is key. As Paul Romer and other leading students of innovation have show, investments in innovations and ideas have extraordinary rates of return and promise to pay incredible dividends precisely because they are public goods; the benefits they confer are broad and reverberate throughout the entire economy.
We need to extend the definition of innovation beyond technology and R&D to include investment the arts, culture, and all forms of innovation and creativity. In spring of 2003, I had the good fortune to meet with high-ranking British economic officials in Tony Blair's cabinet. We were on the topic of high-tech clusters, and they voiced concern over their ability to ever overtake the U.S. in this field. We began to brainstorm other possible British niches, and as a way to spur the conversation I asked the ministers to rattle off the richest people in the U.K. They shot back without hesitation, and in their list I began to notice a pattern: Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Elton John, and David Bowie. Someone joked that not only were these performers fabulously wealthy - most of them had been knighted, too. Largely without realizing it, the U.K had created a killer cluster. Only when we begin to see all of these investments - scientific, economic, artistic, cultural, and other - as mutually reinforcing parts of the same creative whole will we begin to take advantage of even a fraction of our latent human potential.
Richard Florida, Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, is a keynote speaker at the 2007 National Conference on the Creative Economy, hosted by Fairfax County, October 24-25, where he will present his latest thinking on how the Creative Economy will affect companies and communities. Sponsored in part by FORTUNE magazine, the conference will examine the role that a strong, creative workforce plays in the growth and success of businesses and communities in an information-based economy. To register for the conference, visit http://www.creativeeconomies.org.
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