BOP Consulting's Culture and Creative Industries Blog

Happy Christmas from BOP Consulting

Today is BOP's last working day in 2011, so we would like to wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. We will be back on January 3rd, 2012.

Lego Christmas tree, St Pancras station, London.

The Portas Review and culture

The review into the future of Britain's high streets, conducted by Mary Portas, has been published by BIS, the business department. The Portas Review acknowledges the challenges facing high-street retail, from the growth in online retailing to the rise of the supermarkets and the expansion of out-of-town retail parks, and set outs 28 recommendations to try and tackle some of these problems. These include:

• Empower successful Business Improvement Districts to take on more responsibilities and powers and become “Super-BIDs”

• Make it easier for people to become market traders by removing unnecessary regulations so that anyone can trade on the high street unless there is a valid reason why not

• Support imaginative community use of empty properties through Community Right to Buy, Meanwhile Use and a new “Community Right to Try”

• Make explicit a presumption in favour of town centre development in the wording of the National Planning Policy Framework

The Portas Review has generally been well-received (see here for examples) but from our point of view it is disappointing to note that culture's potential role in reviving high streets gets only limited coverage. Portas says in her introduction that "I want to put the heart back into the centre of our high streets, re-imagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning." but, apart from brief mentions of the Meanwhile Project, Coventry Artspace and Brixton Village, she doesn't really return to culture and creativity in the remainder of her report (though she does thank Urban Pollinators in particular for their contribution - we have blogged about their work before). While Portas cannot, of course, cover everything in her report, this is something of a missed opportunity. 

BOP Consulting is moving office

BOP Consulting is moving  office today. We are leaving Margaret Street in Fitzrovia after five years, and heading east to St John Street in Farringdon. As a result, BOP staff will be working from home today, so if you need to get hold of us, please try our mobiles. Our email server will also be disconnected for a few hours as it is moved.

Please bear with us - normal service should be resumed tomorrow.     

The economic importance of smaller cities in the South East

The Centre for Cities has written an interesting report pointing out that some of the smaller cities and larger towns of the South East and East of England punch well above their weight in economic terms. The report, Investing in Growth Cities, looks at the 15 members of Regional Cities East (the sponsors of the research), which range from Peterborough in the north to Southampton in the west, and include Oxford, Brighton and Milton Keynes. It finds they accounted for 27% of net jobs growth in England from 1998-2008 (the Centre for Cities does not say what their share of England's population is, but we reckon it's under 10%). The report goes on to suggest ways the cities might build on this good performance.   

DCMS publishes Creative Industries Economic Estimates for 2011

Last week the DCMS published its latest set of creative industries economic estimates. This is a startling document on several levels. We can't remember the last time we saw a government report as shoddily produced as this one. The text is littered with grammatical mistakes, typos, formatting issues, and odd choices of wording: the creative industries themselves are several times referred to as 'the Creative Industry', for instance. There is no sign that the document has been proofread which, given how often these figures are quoted in our sector, is alarming.*

[*These comments refer to the text of the version the DCMS published on 8 December. It seems this was a pre-publication draft which was posted on the website by mistake. On 22 December, a revised version was posted with corrected presentation and formatting. All the data estimates are unchanged from the earlier version.]

The numbers, too, are startling. The DCMS has made some changes to its methodology, which have major consequences. Firstly, after years of treating all the computer software sector as creative, it has now decided (after consultation) to drop most of it, keeping codes related to computer gaming. It has also, seemingly on the advice of the Office for National Statistics, decided to drop the 'scaling' it was applying to the Gross Value Added (GVA) of the sector. This amounted to a 'top-up' of 30% to account for deficiencies in the survey data, which is now thought unnecessary. Some other smaller changes have been made to the methodology too, including switching to the Annual Population Survey instead of the Labour Force Survey.

The results indicate that:

• Total creative employment (i.e. both inside and outside the creative industries) was 1.5m in 2010, up fractionally on the previous year (on this new basis of calculation). Just under 900,000 of these jobs are in the creative industries. The larger figure amounts to 5.1% of all jobs.

• GVA in 2009 was £36.3bn, or 2.9% of the UK's total. Half of it came from advertising and publishing. 

• Exports were 10.6% of GDP (in 2009), driven by publishing and TV & Radio.

• There were 107,000 creative enterprises in the UK, 5.1% of the total.

The numbers also appear to confirm something that BOP has written about before: the dominance of the greater South East of England in the UK's creative economy. According to these figures, the East of England alone has more creative enterprises than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. 

The DCMS points out, fairly enough, that the new basis of calculating the estimates means direct comparisons shouldn't be made between these figures and their previous ones. Nonetheless, it has to be said that these new figures are far lower: the DCMS's estimate for creative employment in last year's report was 2.3m, GVA was 5.6% of the UK total and creative enterprises numbered 182,000. Such big changes are unlikely to do much for the sector's credibility.  

 

 

BOP staff choose their favourite buildings and discoveries of 2011

This is BOP's final selection of our cultural highlights of 2011 - architecture and discoveries of the year. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them. We'd love to hear your choices too.

 Architecture

A number of striking new cultural buildings opened this year including the Riverside Museum in Glasgow and the Marlowe theatre in Canterbury. Will such schemes be a thing of the past in the age of austerity?

New building of the year: The Hepworth Wakefield (architect: David Chipperfield).

A triumph of light and space that wonderfully showcases the collection and blends beautifully with the weir; at last, a reason to visit Wakefield!

 

Regeneration project of the year: Central St Martins, King’s Cross (architect: Stanton Williams)

The new Central Saint Martins campus at Kings Cross is stunning and it anchors the huge Kings Cross Central regeneration scheme: deft building design combined with clever place-making.

Refurbishment of the year: National Museum of Scotland (museum design: Ralph Appelbaum Associates)

It was nice before, but it’s a fabulous space since the re-opening!

Discoveries

This category includes those things, places or people that the rest of the world may have known about, but which we only stumbled across in 2011.

Frank’s Café and Campari Bar

The Frank’s Bar / Bold Tendencies double act at the top of their Peckham multi-storey car park deserves a prize. It’s a superb venue for a summer drink, a band, and to look at some interesting (but mostly awful) sculptures.

 

Steffen Dam: A Danish artist whose elegant riffs (in glass) on plant and marine life really caught the eye at the Craft Council’s COLLECT fair in the early summer.

Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir: First published in France in 1966, this is a mesmerising portrait of how consumerism shapes the way we construct our identity and present ourselves to the external world.

Georgia (former Soviet republic of): OK, I sort of knew where Georgia was before, but on a visit this year I was really struck by the vibrancy of its capital, its hospitable people, its food, and the beauty and variety of the landscapes once you leave Tbilisi.

Vik Muniz: A Brazilian artist based in New York, Muniz is a vivid example of how the arts can change lives. One of his projects, portrayed in the documentary Wasteland, involved him working with garbage pickers in Rio de Janeiro: the art they created together has been shown in galleries around the globe.

Finally, a rediscovery. This list, and others like it, focus on the new, but the pleasures of re-visiting classics can be considerable. As we age, we bring different perspectives and experiences to our encounters with great work.

Rediscovery of the year: Bleak House by Charles Dickens   

I’ve started re-reading novels, and it’s a revelation. The story and its characters are the same but the nuance and the meaning are different. Bleak House is still a rattling good detective story and satire on the law and lawyers, but now what I love are the reflections on how to live well and, in particular, on the nature of love and the curse of money.

BOP staff choose their favourite TV, art and songs of 2011

At BOP we are choosing our cultural highlights of 2011 - these are our choices of TV, art and songs. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them.

Television

2011 was the year British TV got its mojo back. BBC drama output has been the strongest in years with distinctive new work from British and Irish writers (Abi Morgan’s The Hour, Hugo Blick’s Shadow Line, and Ronan Bennett’s Hidden); Channel 4 triumphed with the sitcom Fresh Meat and its compelling drama about the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict, The Promise; More4 weighed in with Mark Cousins’ magisterial The Story of Film, and BBC4 continued to excel by adding top notch European drama (The Killing, Spiral) to its already formidable roster of science and music programming and documentaries on disparate subjects you never knew you wanted a documentary on (Ice? Indian Rolls-Royces? The British chemical industry?!). Not that we’ve chosen any of these as our winner, mind you.

TV programme of the year: Made in Chelsea (E4)

It may have been slow and awkward, but Made in Chelsea was the surprise BOP hit of the autumn. Will Caggy ever get back together with Spencer? What really happened with Hugo and Millie? We can’t wait for the next series.  

 

 

Runner-up: The Apprentice (BBC1)

Despite refreshing the format, the programme is, in truth, starting to show its age a bit in what was its seventh series – still great fun, though.

Art

In a good year for art, a number of excellent exhibitions didn’t quite make the cut – George Shaw’s show of his melancholy suburban landscapes at the Baltic, for instance. We picked three that stood out for us:

Art exhibition of the year: Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern.

We are in the presence of greatness: a painter of staggering range, technique and power.  

 

Runners-up:

Tracey Emin, Love is What You Want, at the Hayward Gallery.

Emin showed her range and depth of work in this show. She is a class act and the one of the few YBAs who actually had some lasting ideas.

de Kooning: A Retrospective at MOMA, New York.

What an artist! Not content with inventing abstract expressionism, Willem de Kooning constantly redefined the art-form over six decades and was instrumental in making New York the world’s art capital.

Public art project of the year: Martin Creed’s The Scotsman Steps, Edinburgh.

104 steps of different coloured marble; on a sunny day, they’re a low-key but effective and beautiful addition to everyday life.

Music

It was women who continued to make the running in music in 2011, led by the world-conquering Adele. We particularly liked the new albums by Gillian Welch, Anna Calvi and Zola Jesus.

Song of the year: Video Games by Lana Del Rey.

A moody ballad, a great video, and a dash of controversy over her alleged inauthenticity – a winning combination.

 

 

Best album track not released as a single: Moving Further Away by The Horrors (from the album Skying).

Psychedelia, motorik krautrock and trance meet to monumental effect.

Tomorrow we pick our architecture and discoveries of the year.

BOP staff choose their favourite books, films and theatre of 2011

It’s the season when newspapers publish their ‘best ofs’ for the year. We thought we’d join in the fun by choosing our own cultural highlights of 2011. We’ll print them over the next three days, starting today with our choices of book, film and theatre. The descriptions come from the BOP staff member who nominated them.

Books

Book of the year by a former BOP employee: Fold by Tom Campbell

Tom’s first novel is a tale of male friendships steadily coming apart over the poker table. Published in early summer, it won good reviews from some of our most distinguished literary journals (the TLS, Metro) and collected several five-star raves on Amazon, not all of which were written by Tom’s friends. In a double triumph, Tom also wrote this blog’s most popular post of the year (see here), for which many thanks.

Book of the year by anybody else: Snowdrops by A.D. Miller

An intelligent, atmospheric thriller about a thirtysomething English lawyer dangerously out of his depth in post-communist Moscow. 

Runner-up: Sunset Park by Paul Auster

Films

A mixed bag this year, like most years, but we found some films we liked.

Film of the year (drama): The Skin I Live In (directed by Pedro Almodovar, starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya).

Almodovar back to his best: this film is a stylish, thrilling and disturbing exploration of identity.

 

 

Runner-up: Hanna (directed by Joe Wright, starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Lady Mary from Downton Abbey).

A modern fairytale disguised as a Euro action thriller, Hanna also manages to meld road movie and comedy into the mix to great effect.

Documentary film of the year: TT3D: Closer to the Edge (directed by Richard de Aragues)

A 3D documentary about participants in the Isle of Man TT, the Guardian was bang on in saying: “What could have been a pretty dull film just for motorbike fans and devotees of the Isle of Man TT race, achieves real human interest and excitement”. The crashes are spectacular and heart-wrenching. A British film better than The King’s Speech.

Runner-up: 12 Angry Lebanese (directed by Zeina Daccache)

Maybe not the best film of the year, but a moving one: a documentary about the power of the arts.

Theatre

Our choices here reflect the increasingly hard to categorise nature of theatrical performance – mixing styles and art-forms to achieve its impact.

Water, at the Tricycle theatre, Kilburn.

Created by David Farr and the experimental theatre company Filter, Water was immersive, cinematic and moving (making it a good year for Farr as he also popped up as co-writer of Hanna).

 

 

Dance Marathon by bluemouth inc., at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh.

Interactive performance event that had the audience dancing for four hours non-stop. A feat of endurance, the joy of watching people dance, and exploring your own boundaries: how far can you go without collapsing before time is up?

Common Sounds: Touching the Void by Rambert Dance Company, the London Contemporary Orchestra and the NeoFuturist Collective, at the former Commonwealth Institute, Kensington. 

Part of the InTRANSIT festival, Common Sounds was an intense two-and-a-half-hour 'site-responsive theatre experience' that included modern dance, installations, theatre, and a beautiful interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.

  

 

Amsterdam Fringe Festival

Now in its seventh year, this was an eye-opening mix of theatrical anarchy and creative explosions – more than 500 performances from all over the world held in nightclubs and theatres, on the streets, in living rooms and even in a swimming pool. And all held together (in terrible weather) by excellent organisation and endless invention.

Tomorrow we'll make our TV, art and music choices. We'd love to hear what your favourites were too.

 

BOP at WIPO, talking about consumer attitudes to copyright

Last week, BOP’s Head of Research, Richard Naylor, spoke at the Seventh Session of the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s (WIPO) Advisory Committee on Enforcement (details here). Richard was there to present BOP’s work on Consumers’ Attitudes and Behaviours in the Digital World and their Implications for Copyright, commissioned by the Intellectual Property Office's predecessor, SABIP. Here he gives his impressions of the Session.

The meeting was very much one of those UN-type meetings familiar from news reports and movies – an array of delegates seated according to their country, listening on headsets to simultaneous translation in six languages.

The work that we (David Humphries of the IPO and I) were presenting was actually published at the very beginning of 2010. Much has happened in UK intellectual property policy since then, particularly the Hargreaves Review earlier this year. Looking back, it is pleasing to see that the main thrust of our conclusions within the report – that research into consumers’ attitudes and behaviours needs to move away from framing the issue exclusively as one of criminality, and look at it instead as a consumer decision in which the consumer is confronted with a wide set of choices and constraints (of which illegality is only one among many) – has helped to influence policy, at least in the UK.

BOP was asked to present alongside the IPO as it (the IPO) is keen to see the kind of approach that we suggested, especially the framework for understanding consumer behaviour and attitudes we proposed (see below), taken up and used internationally.

The presentation went down well, with a number of interesting questions asked in response. In particular, it seemed to strike a chord with representatives of emerging and developing countries present in the room, as well as with the Swiss IPO, Public Knowledge (a digital think-tank from Washington DC), and the representative from the Internal Market & Services DG at the European Commission, who have established an Observatory on IP.

In later discussions, everyone could agree with the Commission’s stated desire to establish ‘IP policy that is effective and proportionate’. But the devil is in the detail. Each country and organisation has a different take on what the adjectives ‘effective’ and ‘proportionate’ mean in this context. In turn, this reflects differing economic and political ideologies. The different emphasis applied to these terms was most apparent in debates around IP and international development, particularly regarding medicine. As one delegate put it, ‘IP cannot be addressed unless poverty and literacy can be addressed’.

It was an instructive two days that provided BOP with a valuable insight into how a key international institution for the regulation of intellectual property functions. Unlike many sessions or conferences, there was plenty of time for discussion and the airing of disagreements – which were frequent, though always expressed impeccably politely. Smiles, though, appeared to be banned, but at least nobody fell asleep!

If you would like to know more about how BOP could help you research areas related to intellectual property, please contact Richard Naylor on contact@bop.co.uk or ring 0207 307 3090.

 

 

Which cities best support innovation?

The Work Foundation has published an interesting report - Streets Ahead: what makes a city innovative? - looking at innovation in British cities. The report, written by Lizzie Crowley, argues that different cities support very different innovation systems, but that the Coalition government's policies don't acknowledge this. Indeed, despite the commitment to localism, Crowley suggests that innovation policy is becoming incresaingly centralised.

The report goes on to identify different types of innovating cities. They include:

• High performing cities are highly productive, specialised in a range of knowledge intensive innovative sectors, and benefit form a concentration of skilled labour. This set of cities include London as well as other cities located in the Greater South East: Guildford, Peterborough, Southampton and Swindon.

• Service sector innovators have highly productive economies but are specialised in high tech services and businesses services activities. They include Milton Keynes, Glasgow, Manchester, Reading and Bristol.

• High technology innovators generate significant economic output and are specialised in high tech manufacturing activities. They include Coventry, Derby, Northampton, Preston and Warrington/Wigan. These high tech clusters are often anchored by one large global firm, such as Rolls Royce in Derby and Coventry.

Crowley goes on to suggest, among other things, that the government should introduce an Innovation Fund for Local Enterprise Partnerships.

 

Creative Europe: a new opportunity for the creative sector?

BOP consultant, Callum Lee, offers his take on the new Creative Europe programme.

Last week the first proposals were announced for Creative Europe, the big European funding programme (running from 2014-20) that supports the creative and cultural sectors. It includes the merger of the Culture Programme, which funds the arts, with  Media, which funds film and media, into a single programme.

Although the strategy contains a hint of fiddling-while-Rome-burns, it does include an interesting new cross-sectoral financial facility, a development that echoes a number of calls from UK bodies, such as the CBI and BIS, to try to improve access to finance for creative SMEs. It’s a €210 million scheme, building on a successful model in the Media programme aimed at film. This is still a proposal so a lot may change but it seems a good idea to us.

There are also a number of other relevant initiatives for the creative industries, like the European Creative Industries Alliance, which fall under other directorates.

Meanwhile at BOP we will continue our partnership with the European Creative Business Network and our work for the european centre for creative economy, blithely ignoring the dangers of an imminent collapse of the euro.

Dave O'Brien on finding tools to measure culture

Dave O'Brien of City University has published an article in the Guardian setting out the argument for using economic valuation techniques to measure the benefits of culture. For all the challenges inherent in such approaches, O'Brien believes they are the only way to get to grips with the issues in a way that government will understand.  

Using economics to value culture is sound for pragmatic reasons because this is how central government is supposed to appraise policy. Her Majesty's Treasury recommends the use of cost-benefit analysis for policy decisions, with economic valuation techniques for things that don't have prices associated with them. Decisions about arts and cultural funding therefore need to find ways to fit in with this way of making public policy.

He goes on to point out:

Measurement in the arts and cultural sector is difficult but this is no less true of any other area of public policy. How can we value a human life? What is the value of the environment? These difficult questions were faced by the Departments for Health and Environment during the 1990s, with similar objections voiced about the uniqueness of these respective policy areas.

However both areas have engaged with disciplines such as economics to construct useful tools for decision-making. These tools are not perfect and are subject to criticism, but they have made transparent and informed decision-making possible in areas where demand is high and resources are scarce.

We linked to O'Brien's report for the DCMS (Measuring the value of culture) back in January - it can be read here.

(Update: The critic, Tiffany Jenkins, has written a response to O'Brien's piece, also in the Guardian - it's here.)

Creative industries in Russia

Creative Compass is a joint Finnish-Russian programme designed to build links between the two countries, particularly in culture. As part of this work, the organisation has commissioned a number of reports, one of which assesses the creative industries in Russia.

The report, Creative Industries Russian Profile, by Elena Zelentsova and Elena Melvil, finds that Russia's creative industries are still struggling to make an impact, and are very much concentrated in Moscow and St Petersburg. The sector face a number of problems, ranging from weak consumer demand, a preference for imported creative products, weak enforcement of copyright laws and a lack of networks or associations within the industries themselves.

The arts and creative industries worth 3% of Ireland's GDP

Indecon Consulting has produced a report for the Arts Council of Ireland looking at the economic contribution of Arts Council-funded organisations, the wider arts sector, and the creative industries to the Republic of Ireland's economy. The report, Assessment of the Economic Impact of the Arts in Ireland, finds that:

• It is estimated that the creative industries – of which the wider arts sector activities form a sub-set – contributed a total of €4.7 billion in GVA terms during 2010. This was equivalent to approximately 3% of Irish Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during that year.

• The sub sector with the highest contribution was software which accounted for €2.77 billion of the overall GVA impact, more than half of the total contribution of the creative industries.

• The number of direct jobs supported by the creative industries was estimated to amount to 49,306 jobs during 2010.

How working with artists helps scientists and engineers to innovate

The Crafts Council has just published a short report, Crafting Capital, looking at the fruits of collaborations between artists (craft makers in particular)  and scientists, technologists and engineeers. The report's author, Dr Karen Yair, argues that 'Craft makers today work in a far greater range of contexts than is widely realised', and cites a number of examples of such collaborations, including:

• The world’s first tissue engineered organ transplant took place in July 2011, saving the life of a throat cancer patient. Glass maker Matt Durran played a crucial role in developing the technology behind the operation, specifically in creating moulds for the tissue that could withstand the fierce heat of a bio-reactor.

• New ‘smart’ fabrics that connect people with their physical environment and the internet are being developed by textile maker Philippa Brock. The woven fabrics are conductive and can incorporate touch, skin and environmental sensors whilst connecting wirelessly to mobile phones and other web-enabled devices.

• Biojewellery, a collaboration between Royal College of Art and Guys Hospital researchers, is exploring the potential for engineered human bone tissue to be grown into new shapes, supported by a bioactive scaffold.