ABSTRACT
Today, promotion of creative industries as catalysts of economic growth has been common but not equally successful everywhere. For years London’s Millennium Dome seemed a great white elephant until rescued by Las Vegas entertainment investment. Sheffield’s Rock Music Museum (National Centre for Popular Music) is just one of the many casualties of misplaced optimism towards the power of symbolic infrastructure. Ironically, independent movie mogul Harvey Weinstein saved the former aspiration when he opened the ‘British Music Experience’ in the former facility, now renamed as the O2Arena in 2009 (Mugan 2009). Indeed, it seems the creative industry contribution to economic development is hard to plan successfully. Nevertheless, the UK as one of the countries pioneering the ‘creative city’ (Landry and Bianchini 1995) unquestionably takes the concept of creative industries contributing to economic welfare completely seriously, establishing a Ministry of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport – DCMS) to oversee the broad field and give definition to the platform. In this case the notion of ‘platform’ captures the diversity and sometimes ‘related variety’ (Frenken et al. 2007) of the many activities that make up the category of ‘creative industries’. These are more than a vertical sector or cluster; rather they comprise networks of firms and organizations that cross-pollinate the distinctive creative elements that coalesce therein. As such and in their organically shifting forms they are difficult to pin down and predict behaviourally or locationally.
