CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Welcome to Introduction to Creative Industries. 

This module explores the foundational concepts and theories of the creative industries. While the creative and cultural industries continue to grow, students undertaking creative ‘industries’ courses in universities often lack a strategic knowledge of the operation and structure of the businesses in which they hope to be employed. Courses typically emphasise the practicalities of production, or a more academically focused critique of media theory. Too often, little attention is paid to issues of business practice and administration. This module, seeks to address this gap and to provide you with the relevant theories, conceptual tools and factual information necessary to gain an understanding of, and be able to engage critically with, the realities of managing, working and progressing within the cultural and creative industries. Specifically, this module aims to give you a theoretical and practical understanding of the specific characteristics of the media sector in terms of how it is organised, intra- and inter-organisational behavior, relationship management in creative industries value chains, different business models and the major challenges creative industries firms face in the current media and competitive environment. Such challenges include the proliferation of digital technologies with the potential to fundamentally disrupt existing business models of creation, transaction, and distribution (disassembly, disintermediation, remediation), yet also to offer reassembly through new tools for creativity, new architectures and ecologies for mass collaboration and user involvement, and the accelerated generation of new market categories (mashups, peer to peer file sharing, open source software, repurposing). We will critically consider the varying roles of digital technology in the creative industries, giving in the process students a better understanding of complex innovation and transformation processes on a number of levels – from organizational practices to industry structures – and in a number of spheres – economic, legal, and social – spanning both national and transnational institutional arrangements. Some of the questions we seek to answer during the course of the module include the following: