The Tallinn Manifesto: Creative Entrepreneurship for a Creative Economy

The Tallinn Manifesto calls for a re-think in how we approach creative entrepreneurship for a competitive economy. It sets out an agenda for a refreshed and re-invigorated approach to knowledge development, collaboration, strategy and policy. The purpose of the Tallinn Manifesto is to provide a stimulus and focus for debate, which then develops as a driver for strategy and policy. At the conference in October 2011 in Tallinn, Estonia, the Manifesto was discussed and re-shaped through the direct input of delegates and speakers.

 

Theme 1: Creative Talent

The post-crisis creative economy requires a mix of skills and competencies, both within and outside the Creative Economy. This is a critical agenda, not least in Europe where youth unemployment has spiked well above 20% in many regions. Here there is a need to reconceptualise what we mean by a ‘creative education’ and develop new progressive models to ensure creativity is a pervasive asset across society. This includes developing approaches that genuinely embed creativity and cultural activity as core elements of a balanced education.

Recommendations:

1. We position creative and cultural education as an absolute entitlement for young people throughout their formal and non-formal learning journeys. We need to support teachers and other educators to enable this, and develop capacity and competency in the arts and creative sectors so they can operate as effective service providers. This is a non-negotiable for a competitive, sustainable and resilient economy.
   
2. We develop targeted initiatives to develop employment and sustainable careers for young people – as an urgent priority. This is to attend to the global crisis in youth unemployment: activities in the creative industries are labour intensive and help to develop core critical skills transferable to other sectors, as well as jobs in their own right. Creative apprenticeships have a major role to play here – brokering employment opportunities in the Creative Industries. In addition, projects which seek to directly create jobs for young people, such as the British Council-led ‘Future City Jobs’, should be scaled-up to deliver Europe-wide impact on youth employment in the Creative Economy.
   
3. We open up our higher education sector to play a more proactive role in skills development for creative entrepreneurs and knowledge exchange for the wider Creative Economy. This means dedicated industry partnership, a more entrepreneurial approach to developing new business models from within academic institutions, and a genuine exchange that drives up innovation and productivity in collaborating businesses outside such institutions. This should focus on endowing entrepreneurs with a set of core skills for their business life (in management, markets and money), developing socially engaged practice with local communities (putting creativity and arts into place-making), exploring boundary-crossing experimentation with other institutions and businesses, and of course retaining an approach that delivers excellence in the creative arts.
   
4. We position innovation as a core practice for every creative entrepreneur. Innovation doesn’t have to mean radical and disruptive practice based on extreme collaboration: it is for everyone. We need to support our creative businesses and the wider Creative Economy to develop incremental innovation and embed ‘intrapreneurship’ as an essential perspective for business renewal and development.
   
5. We ensure professional development and learning are continuous in their availability and multi-faceted in their offer – so that our creative entrepreneurs encounter new ways of working and develop the range of competencies necessary for survival and then growth over the course of their careers. This should also focus on enabling 2^nd and 3^rd careers to prosper – enabling older creative entrepreneurs to set up and flourish and supporting collaboration that is inter-generational an intercultural – so that our full talent base is embraced.
   
6. We develop capacity and skills in digital technology – for entrepreneurs and for consumers. By increasing access to digital technology and the platforms it enables, and by nurturing confidence in this domain, we will flatten digital divides, grow markets and increase the capacity of creative entrepreneurs to reach and engage these markets.
   

 

Theme 2: Creative Business - Driving Innovation and competitiveness across the economy

The last ten years and more have seen the rise of targeted business development services, investment programmes and cluster initiatives. They are all based on the assumed ‘exceptionalism’ of creative businesses. For example, they are designed to appeal to the challenges many creative businesses have in balancing the creative and commercial, independent and corporate, cultural and managerial; the inherent flexibility required of many creative businesses – which are in many cases relatively small, portfolio-driven and project-focused; and the difficulties such businesses face in maximising the commercial potential of their intellectual property and attracting appropriate investment for growth.

We need a critical review here – to better understand what has and hasn’t worked. For example, we need to explore whether such approaches actually separate creative businesses from the rest of the economy – exaggerating their ‘exceptionalism’ and reducing their capacity to attract mainstream investment and develop markets. Does special treatment mean that creative businesses (and especially those which operate in a mixed economy with a strong link to public investment) actually pull away from the rest of the economy and fail to deliver significant value as a consequence?

Recommendations:

1. We position our Creative Economies as central to our overall competitiveness and well-being – not as a junior partner to biotech, finance or service industries. This means commitment and leadership from a Government to institutional level, collaborating to explore ways that maximise the value of creativity to society – from higher value jobs to well-being.
   
2. We attend to the specific elements that make creative businesses and entrepreneurs ‘exceptional’, and integrate approaches where such exceptionalism doesn’t exist. For example, introduce investment readiness activities for creative businesses but only introduce targeted investment where there is real evidence of market failure in mainstream investment sources (such as retail banks, equity funds etc.). For example, introduce export insurance incentives for businesses trading in creative goods and services only where there is evidence of weaker exports for such businesses because of inaccessibly high insurance costs. This requires an evidence-based approach and one grounded on knowledge rather than aspiration.
   
3. We open up international markets for creative businesses by brokering peer exchanges between entrepreneurs working in different markets. Just as we encourage exchange between policy-makers (see Theme 5), we should encourage both knowledge and trade-focused collaboration between different creative businesses. This is particularly important in smaller markets where access to skills and different types of capital is limited. We can support our creative entrepreneurs to ‘scale-up’ through international collaboration.
   
4. We develop a set of globally recognised metrics for valuing intangible assets. This means mapping effective business models, tracking returns on investment, and balancing an appreciation of the different assets in a business (or consortia of businesses) – such as in management, finance, marketing and technology.
   
5. We radically revise our approaches to measuring and articulating the value of creativity, culture and the overall Creative Economy – e.g. to specific cities, regions and nations. We need to co-create coherent and consistent approaches to measurement and to road-test new methodologies across a network of international case studies. This is to establish a tool-kit and guide for the measurement of creativity in the economy. It should include social outcomes and the development of creative communities, as well as pure economic / monetary outcomes.
   
6. We enshrine creativity in planning policy - building on previous ‘% for arts’ schemes to incentivise investment in design, arts and other creative services as an integral part of the planning and development process. This builds a market for our creative entrepreneurs and embeds creativity across the physical and social fabric of our towns and cities.
   

Theme 3: Creative Infrastructure for a New Age

With increasing digitisation comes greater convergence (in how products and services are produced and consumed), which in turn requires our creative businesses and organisations to be more interdisciplinary, open and collaborative. For a growing and sustainable Creative Economy, we need to develop infrastructure that enables creative businesses to collaborate – with one another and with the rest of the economy. Ideally, every town or city of any scale would have arts and cultural organisations with infrastructure that genuinely brokers and enables the flows between the arts ecology and Creative Economy. Here we need to develop new thinking on the types of infrastructure required to deliver innovation and growth across the Creative Economy.

Recommendations:

1. We position our arts and cultural infrastructure to the heart of our Creative Economy. This means building capacity and confidence for the arts and cultural sector to become more entrepreneurial, collaborative and open. It means we position our libraries, theatres, galleries, museums and cinemas as spaces of convergence and interdisciplinary practice, as hubs of creative business, sites of cross-sector exchange, and as providers for creative education and talent development.
   
2. We support arts and cultural organisations to flourish in a mixed economy. Broadening the range of revenue sources for arts and cultural organisations is a must if the arts economy is be sustainable and grow and if it is to play a more progressive role for the Creative Economy. This means coordinating blended investment across arts and culture, the brokerage/leverage of different types of co-investment, encouraging crowd-funding, pursuing new business models, and growing and then embedding a culture of philanthropy.
   
3. We develop digital capacity across the arts and cultural sector – to enable audiences to be reached and engaged in new, often deeper ways; to support the collaboration between different organisations (sharing content, audiences and knowledge); and to develop new, productive and scalable business models so the arts and cultural sector play a much larger direct role for the Creative Economy.
   
4. We leverage this digital capacity to encourage innovation and extend reach across the arts and cultural sector – such as in coordinated programming, commissioning of talent and shared approaches to management.
   
5. We commission interdisciplinary research and practice between the arts and wider economy – such as with technologists, scientists, planners and core municipal services. This is to explore the wider value of arts practice and creative thinking across the economy and society.
   
6. We pilot new and emergent workspace models – from flexible digital creative networks that feed physical hubs (e.g. creative membership models), to creative home-working, to pop up activities in old industrial and retail spaces.
   
7. We invest in and champion innovation in our arts and cultural infrastructure - where constant renewal, knowledge development and experimentation are a core business. This means moving beyond the needs of core audiences and re-defining excellence to include a willingness to take risks and collaborate to innovate.
   

 

Theme 4: Creative Cities and Regions

For more than a decade, many cities and regions have developed strategies and policies for the Creative Economy. Often these are underpinned by robust approaches to sector mapping and consultation, yet equally often they are not. In a time of overall economic growth, cities and regions were able to position the Creative Industries as critical drivers of their rejuvenated economies, diversifying the economic base, providing jobs and enhancing overall confidence. Yet in a time of economic downturn, we see that in many places the role and impact of the Creative Industries was exaggerated and used as much as a tool in civic “boosterism” as real and substantive economic development. We also see that the Creative industries in many places remained an exclusive sector, without delivering much value to the relatively disadvantaged and long-term unemployed.

To begin with, we need to reflect on how some cities and regions have successfully nurtured sustainable and resilient Creative Economies, while others have struggled. We need to better understand how creative entrepreneurs are operating to change cities and regions after the downturn, exploring the different types of enabling conditions which enable creative businesses to flourish. And we need to work with our politicians and policy-makers so that they don’t take the easy option with a ‘creativity agenda’, but they develop a commitment to structured, realistic and evidence-based approaches to sector development.

This means we need to reposition and repurpose the Creative Economy for a new age of city-making and regional development where the gap between rhetoric and reality is much narrower. This also means accepting that in some places the Creative Industries will not and may never be a major sector in its own right. In such places we need to work harder to lever different types of value from the Creative Industries, from arts and culture, and from creative approaches to planning and development. In such places we need to explore the value of creativity in a more holistic way – in how we develop skills and competencies, how we improve competitiveness in manufacturing and services, how we ‘widen the shoulders’ of our tourism sector, and how we enable innovation to flourish.

Recommendations:

1. Each city/region to establish a Creative Commission to drive strategy and policy development across the Creative Economy. This is to ensure a bespoke and nuanced approach is taken that builds from the specific strengths of the local Creative Economy and attends to its weaknesses in a joined-up way. This should be the major public private partnership for sector development and the core means of ensuring agendas from education to regeneration, economy to arts, are joined up. This should also promote more socially-driven, inclusive and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to creative development, ensuring it is not just the privileged few who benefit.
   
2. We develop open and collaborative platforms for creative exchange and trade as the next generation of Creative Clusters. These are interdisciplinary, often distributed across cities or even between cities, and not rigidly demarcated by planners. Our arts and cultural infrastructure plays an important role here – as hubs and connectors. We should also encourage flexible approaches to workspace – opening up our cities through digital technology, supporting smarter transport solutions, and encouraging the city overall to be viewed as a place where work, home and play converge.
   
3. We develop local procurement strategies and programmes for our creative businesses: market-making across the economy. This brokers relationships between creative businesses and other sectors – such as in manufacturing, finance and retail. This can be incentivised – such as through ‘Creative Credit’ schemes that encourage ‘non-creative’ businesses to invest in the services of their ‘creative’ peers.
   
4. We promote community entrepreneurship – locally embedded joint action to develop creative experiences, activities and enterprises. This can range from local creative centres to community creative business networks, local creative procurement and exchange projects to investment tools for social enterprises in the Creative Industries.
   
5. We introduce new guidance on Creative Economy strategy and planning for smaller cities and peripheral regions. Much Creative Economy strategy and policy is driven by a metropolitan ‘big city’ agenda – where markets are big, skills pools deep, and ‘critical mass’ guaranteed. Most people do not live and work in such contexts – so we need to establish effective networks and knowledge that enables non-metropolitan places to maximise the potential of their Creative Economies on their own terms.
   

 

Theme 5: Creative Leadership

At a time of significant economic, social, cultural and technological change, our Creative Economies need strong, committed and purposeful leadership. Approaches to the Creative Economy have been fragmented and unfocused, bureaucracy often stands in the way of progressive intervention and collaboration, the relationship between the arts and Creative Industries is under-conceptualised and blurred, and for every successful targeted initiative, wider policies (such as in education or taxation) have undermined sector development.

Recommendations:

1. A Creative Economy Development Programme and Green Paper for each nation and global region (e.g. EU): to develop a holistic and coordinated approach that positions creativity as central to economic, social and environmental sustainability and competitiveness. This should be collaborative, involving business, education and culture. It should be evidence based and mission neutral (i.e. it should not set aspirations for the Creative Economy without first identifying and agreeing what is possible).
   
2. We coordinate cultural and creative leadership programmes across Europe (and other global regions) – to develop capacity, confidence and know-how for key decision-makers and intermediaries. This should connect regions (such as the Generator model in Sweden) and nations (such as the Eurocities Creative Industries network and European Creative Business Network).
   
3. We develop platforms for a next generation of creative leaders – utilising platforms such as the European Creative Business Network, Future City Jobs and European Capital of Culture programmes to open up leadership opportunities for young people, minority communities, and people from smaller cities and rural areas. It should also focus on brokering peer relationships between leaders working in different though interdependent areas – such as education and economy; or community and innovation.
   
4. A commitment from cities and regions to develop refreshed mapping of their Creative Industries sector and to develop methodologies that map the wider value-creating role of creativity. This mapping data and intelligence should be geared toward supporting a joined-up approach to creativity in society – not just for targeted and under-connected interventions in business support, regeneration, community, education, skills and innovation.
   
5. ‘Made Here’ - Market-making for our Creative Economies: a committed approach to nurturing markets for locally produced and ‘sustainable’ creative goods and services, and to promoting these assets to emergent markets. Pan-national approaches should be considered here – to coordinate the efforts of smaller countries and deliver greater impact at the global marketplace.
   
6. The development of knowledge and intelligence bulletins for each market - to enhance competitiveness and confidence across the Creative Economy. These could include:
   

• A focus on market / audience behaviour and consumption – Going beyond audience profiling to action research on new types of consumption, patterns of consumption, barriers to consumption, the disruptive and productive role of digital technology, and the ways markets are changing (and the business models required to reach these markets).
  
• A focus on Innovation and productivity – To develop greater understanding on the contribution of the arts and Creative Industries to wider innovation, how this can be increased and expressed. Equally, greater and improved research is required on issues to do with productivity – including the impact of collaborative ecologies in the Creative Economy and the ways many new clusters, rather than driven by a few large players, are aggregations of multiple micro-businesses and organisations with many complex interdependencies.
  
• A refreshed focus on creative places and clusters – To establish a much clearer appreciation of the role of our cities, regions and rural places in driving innovation and delivering growth for the Creative Economy.
  

The full text of the Tallinn Manifesto:
www.looveesti.ee/creative-entrepreneurship/materials/The_Tallinn_Manifesto.pdf