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Business development in creative digital media represents a major opportunity for Ohio

 

Beginning in 1997, the economic developer's view of the role of arts in an economy began to shift. The Blair government in the U.K. published an important report on "the creative industries". (Note that this development took place 4 or 5 years before Richard Florida published his book.)

 

The idea of treating creative industries as an important source of high income jobs began to take off. Now, you can see in the UK a wide range of urban centers that are embracing the strategy of developing creative industries. They have developed their own web site for creative industry development.

 

Additionally, within the UK, different locations are launching their own efforts. So, you can now visit Creative Edinburgh, for example. Creative London is the most advanced of these local sites, and Creative London has recently formed a joint project with Toronto. Other countries including Austria, Finland, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand see the creative industries as a path to high value added employment.

 

In June 2000, the New England Council picked up the trend when they published the report, The Creative Economy  Initiative: The Role of Arts and Culture in New England’s Economic  Competitiveness. With their partners, they have launched the Creative Economy Initiative. More recently, Providence, home of the Rhode Island School of Design, has adopted creative industries as a core of their economic development strategy. Savannah's Creative Coast and the Charleston Digital Corridor represent other local efforts to capitalize on this emerging opportunity.

 

Earlier this month, Los Angles released its report on the creative industries. Read more. Download the report.

 

The fastest growing segment of the "creative industries clusters" come with "creative digital media" or "rich digital media". It stands to reason. Information is being digitized. The explosion of low cost computing power ( Moore's law), coupled with the power of connectivity and the Internet ( Metcalfe's law) creates an entirely new opportunity to create, produce and distribute rich digital content.

 

Others are seeing the opportunity. Ball State University has landed about $40 million in funding from the Lilly Endowment to launch a digital media initiative. Learn more. Interactive gaming an simulators are changing the way in which complex learning is taking place. The U.S. Defense Department is heavily involved in this research as this presentation and this paper demonstrate.

 

A big opportunity in Ohio comes with creative digital media. Through an extensive set of meetings at REI, Future and Defrag, we are seeing the opportunities emerge in Ohio around gaming, 3-D visualization, and education. We have an extensive assets, and we are uncovering more through Defrag.

 

You can learn more about these opportunities by listening to the Defrag Minutes.

 

Building interactive games -- and applying this technology to education -- represents one of the promising areas for Ohio. To give you some orientation to this opportunity, read the report from New Zealand that looks at their interactive gaming cluster. Download the report. Austin has jumped on this opportunity with its Gaming Expo.

 

Defrag is continuing to develop this cluster with a set of "link and leverage" strategies. To give you some sense of urgency and the opportunities, here are two videos that Lev Gonick played at the recent Cleveland 2.0 meeting. The first focuses on the challenges ahead. The second explores some of our digital opportunities. The Internet is our first interactive mass medium. The technology to launch this interactivity is emerging as "Web 2.0". This technology has profound implications for how economic development will take place in the next decade. To get some understanding of Web 2.0, watch this video.

 

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