The Creative Revolution
Background on the Revolution
With the election of the Labour government in the mid 1990s and throughout this decade the United Kingdom has restructured its national cultural policies to include the creative industries. This shift away from a limited view of culture, encompassing the traditional classical arts, to a larger view of the creative economic sector has paid considerable dividends for the country. During this time the government has identified workspace, intellectual property protection, education, financing and the ability to access foreign markets as the main issues that should be addressed by local authorities to stimulate a thriving creative industries sector.
This novel formula of enlarging the definition of cultural industries to creative industries coupled with systematic research within the sector drastically altered the national discourse on the importance of the creative industries within the economic and social development of the United Kingdom. These new cultural policy ideas have clearly had an effect within the UK and have begun to appear in regional and international policy arenas. Approximately a decade after the first attempts to redefine the cultural industries was undertaken by the British authorities an international wave of national cultural policy reviews is now underway in countries around the world to restructure local industries to facilitate their participation in the creative economy movement.
