Strange Days Indeed: the Emerging Creative Economy
By Andrew Gleisner
The “Creative Economy” has been anticipated for several years now, (http://www.businessweek.com/) and changes are currently underway that will forever alter the makeup of our country’s gross national product. The newest trends lean towards the production of intellectual property (software, design, financial products, entertainment, etc...) and away from manufactured goods and services which are becoming ever more the responsibility of the consumer, such as ATMs for banking and on-line travel services. Knowledge based jobs such as accounting and engineering are being outsourced or altogether replaced with software. With few exceptions, any professional job that can be reduced to a set of rules can also be outsourced or automated.
Our agricultural economy became so efficient that the resulting surplus required far less farms. Not surprisingly, as this country evolved its industrial economy, new efficiencies such as automation and growing overseas competition forced American companies to reconsider the manufacturing process altogether, resulting in a mass exodus of manufacturing jobs. As this chapter unfolded, the first implications of the coming information age were being felt. The resulting knowledge-based economy has now in turn been freed up sufficiently to produce services or abstract goods based on intellectual property, which require even less manufacturing and more innovation. i.e., the “Creative Economy.”
The main advantage to those of us in the “innovation business” is the rising corporate emphasis on R&D, considered a key business function that has remained difficult to outsource. Companies are realizing that ideas and brand are becoming their true assets. Economist Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago said, “In the creative economy, the power to exert influence is nearly unlimited because there’s no ceiling on how many people can be made to depend on idea-based assets.” Think iPod and cell-phones, in which attractive hardware merely encases the idea of mobility. E-Bay, Google and YouTube are even purer forms of this concept. At the same time, corporations are becoming obliged to adopt codes of social responsibility as they become purveyors of culture; they are also dependant on a new class of younger workers that can demand more perks due to the exit of the much larger Boomer generation from the workforce. The resulting cultural shift will no doubt impact corporate identity and product.
Making sense of these divergent forces and changes is confusing at best. The coming impact of workforce shortages, increased outsourcing and greater consumer demand for innovative products is yet to be understood. However, as the world’s appetite for ideas grows, the role of “designer” in our new Creative Economy is likely to be greater than ever.