CULTURE, CREATIVITY, AND INNOVATION IN THE INTERNET AGE

This paper analyses the distinct economic roles of culture, creation, and innovation in the Creative Industries by assessing the fitness for purpose of their statistical definitions. On this basis it proposes a method for studying the relation between creative labour and innovation. Lax usage has made the term ‘Creative Industries ’ a synonym for three distinct things: creativity, culture and intellectual alienability. I use the term Cultural and Creative Sector (CCS). My aim is to distinguish Creative Labour, of which the sector is a specialist user, from Cultural Outputs, which the sector produces. These are found combined in the CCS in an advanced form, but they also exist separately outside it. In order to understand their wider economic impact – in particular, their relation to innovation and Intellectual Property – it is necessary to distinguish them. I begin from the empirical reality of the Creative Industries as currently defined which, I argue, establishes it as an ‘industrial sector’, in the economically meaningfu