Innovative creativity

The whole sector has a mean income 34 per cent higher than the economy as a whole, which suggests a different profile for creatives than the usual view of a chronically low-wage, underemployed sector.

In Queensland, we found that exports from the state and gross value added are higher than average sectorally, and that creative industries tend to be more knowledge-intensive in that they spend more on knowledge-based workers as a percentage of their total wages spend than other sectors.

My last point is the most speculative and in many ways most interesting because it is about the wellsprings of economic thought.

Cultural economics, the traditional approach to arts and culture, uses an argument for public support based on "exceptional" activity in which there will always be market failure. Large cultural industries, such as broadcasting, attract content regulation also based on arguments for market failure. But economic theory that seeks to identify the sources of novelty and change, and the way industries grow, is better suited to understanding a creative economy.

We need to think less about optimal allocation of scarce resources and market failure and more about the wellsprings of innovation, and the way in which the creative industries may function as a bellwether for structural change in modern economies.

The UK group, Focus on Creative Industries, captured this well: "The challenge of the creative industries is the challenge of a new form of economic understanding - they are not 'catching up' with serious, mainstream industries, they are setting the templates which these industries will follow."