The Power of New Ideas

And finally we're in the last plenary session for the conference, on the power of new ideas. This is a panel deliberately of people aged 40 or under, to demonstrate that there is a strong future in this creative industries area. This is facilitated by the multitalented Canadian cultural entrepreneur Sharon Lewis, who now introduces the speakers.

Peter MacLeod: Towards Creative Security

Peter MacLeod makes a start; he is the principal of The Planning Desk in Vancouver. He has recently returned from a tour of Canada to investigate the civic infrastructure of the nation, and suggests that both risk and resolution are inherently political ideas. In addition to creative risk, there also is a need for creative security, in analogy to social security: states exist to mitigate risk (especially risk of violence), which is why the violence seen in New Orleans recently was so alarming, and states are indeed perhaps only relevant for the security they provide. However, government has fallen into a rut, always dealing with the same political problems, and the idea that government is a problem and necessarily inept has become all too prevalent.

So what is the role of the state in engendering the risk revolution? States can support both freedom from and freedom to, and the only security is mutual security - so what security can the state offer to help realise the creative society we are imagining? Currently people (especially children) aren't sufficiently equipped to realise the full potential of their individual creativity, so how can this realisation be ensured through state support? This may also be a corollary to Richard Florida's work - the point is not to ensure the existence of the creative class, but to promote its growth, and this is not only a question of economic need, but also of justice.

Whose burden, whose risk, whose obligation is this process? This is not only about democratic representation, but more importantly it is a politics of recognition, and different from the politics of the mass society. Canada has every advantage in realising the creative society here, but it must also have the hunger to do so.

Donna Morton: Towards Creative Taxing

Donna Morton of the Centre for Integral Economics is next. She asks everyone to consider their role in building a creative society, and she notes that there is a need to do so within a fairly short timeframe of one generation, or 25 years. Taxing might be a tool here, but the tax system (which is where the real power resides in any government) has too long be neglected by young activists as too boring and too unsexy (against which Donna has set up taxesaresexy.org). Instead, she argues, taxes must be shifted away from creative projects and other positive causes, and towards the ugly, the cheap, and the unauthentic (e.g. onto 4WDs). This could harness the power of the market economy for real progress, and could reflect our values in the economy.

The way into this is through municipalities (and states) rather than at the national level. It empowers citizens to put their hands on the economy. Too long economists have been the priests of modern society, and have existed in a different realm - but it is possible to hire these very economists also to develop taxing approaches which promote social causes and civic values. And indeed, many fields are now starved for such positive approaches - there is too much talk about the problems, and too little about what are the possible solutions.

While there is a reluctance on the right as well as on the left to engage in overt social engineering (if for very different reasons), nonetheless it takes place everywhere, and Donna argues that it is very appropriate to use the tax system in this fashion. There is a real urgency to do so also for various other reasons, not least for environmental reasons, because of rising fuel prices, and because of the cultural and social needs of society - and this is why tax shifting is appropriate as a social mechanism.

Taxes are also the most creative end run still available around free trade agreements - other regulatory agreements are no longer possible after the development of GATT and NAFTA, and other free trade agreements around the world. Taxes, however, can still be used to subsidise specific industries or causes. It is possible to tax areas which can no longer be regulated; this generation, Donna suggests, needs to harmonise the way of life and the economy.

Ana Serrano: Towards Creative Innovation

The next speaker is Ana Serrano, the director of the Habitat New Media Lab at the Canadian Film Centre. She runs through a number of projects which Habitat has been involved in, but says that she's getting irritated by being introduced as supporting 'the new new new by the young young things'. The point here is not so much the 'new', but 'birth': the idea of the new implies a kind of vacuum into which the new emerged, but birth shows the connection to the old which led to the new. Therefore, the challenge here is about creating the ideal birthing environment for new ideas.

Ana offers five thought on this point (whose first letters spell 'ideas', get it?):

• integrity: 'do you know when your shit stinks?', that is, do you know yourself well enough to know your original intentions and motivations, and whether you are remaining true to them? Can you critically and rigorously assess whether what you have created is what you intended to create?
• (3-) dimensional thinking: we need to be able to see the forest and the trees at the same time, to think in layers simultaneously, involving context, form, content, and people simultaneously, and often also working in teams to achieve this
• efficacy: how do we enable people to create the capacity to do things, how do we give them permission and access to create things as well as the means of distribution?
• audience: an idea is only powerful if it is taken up by someone else, but audiences are often left out of the mix both in creative work and in policy design - and it is important here not to think only about audiences as people to address through marketing; rather, they need to be actively involved in the design process
• safety: this links back to Peter's point on creative security - places and spaces for creation are one such safety net for creative practitioners, relieving the tension between self and team, fantasy and reality, idea and creation, creation and economy; this is also about developing consistent and understandable rules and processes for the people involved in the creative environment