ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘creative industries’ represents ‘a quite recent category in academic, policy and industry discourse’ (Cunningham 2003: 1). It has been suggested that the formal origins of the concept can be found in the Blair Labour Government’s establishment of a Creative Industries Task Force (CITF) after its election in Britain in 1997 (Flew 2002). The Creative Industries Mapping Document, which was prepared by the newly constituted Department of Culture, Media and Sport (1998), viewed creative industries ‘as those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property’. Nevertheless, the boundaries of ‘creative industries’ remain imprecise; Wood and Taylor (2004: 389) argue that defining creative industries ‘is a task fraught with methodological and semantic challenges’.
