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Competing in the creative and cultura industries
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Competing in the creative and cultura industries
Such strategies are full of platitudes that amount to little more than a series of statements of the obvious, specifying the good things that the firm hopes to achieve. A quick way to discover whether an organization has a strategy is to ask them what opportunities have been rejected, which market segments they will not compete for, which capabilities will not be developed and which product or service benefits will not be offered.
Strategizing therefore often means deciding to stop doing something. This can be an activity that the organization does, a product or service feature, operation in a particular market, or a relationship with a specific partner. Stopping something and deciding not to do something are difficult, as they mean saying no to possible revenue–especially hard to do if what you stop doing is something you can do and have been doing for a while.
The demand and therefore value of a product or experience or service will always carry a high degree of uncertainty. The point about competing strategically is to consider how the organization is currently creating these products and services, to evaluate what it does and why in order to ensure that it is not merely following a script but is making choices about how and what capabilities to employ.
The content of the cultural products is unavoidably and necessarily dynamic, a source of surprise and sometimes disappointment. How it is produced, distributed, explained, and experienced are strategic issues that managers can analyze and experiment with, and decisions that they can take.
There are organizations in the CCI that are doing just that–searching for competitive space valued by customers and distinguished from competitors. In the chapters that follow we will use some of them to illustrate how they made the choices and developed the capabilities that allow them to create their strategies.
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The focus of the creative enterprise must be on the qualities of the product or service, be it the song, the film, the performance, the building, or the dress. Profit is necessary, of course, but is a secondary concern, aby-product of artistic skill and creativity, not a consideration in how to organize that creative practice.
Competing strategically in the CCI requires that if present, either explicitly or implicitly, this view be rejected, and that managing any tensions between creative and commercial rewards be seen as part of the task of the creative organization.
To summarize, being strategic involves looking at how choices are made and practices developed over the firm's governance, resources, and terms of competition. Strategy tackles how the firm is managed and organized, what capabilities and assets are developed and deployed, what products and services it delivers, and what markets it competes in.
Creating new knowledge, insights, and products, and services is not an altogether rational process but often involves curiosity and play. Because developing a strategy and staying open to how it is performing requires generating new knowledge and coping with high levels of uncertainty, being strategic needs more than a planning approach.
It requires‘mindful practice’–thinking with one’s hands, reflecting on what happens,adjusting and discovering.
A strategy is a guide to action, a set of priorities and principles that inform behavior and shape attitude. Unless it can be communicated effectively throughout the organization it will not be realized and will remain a document on a shelf. So, because strategy is both more and less than a budget with explanatory comments, and because strategy involves discovering what we do not know and developing new knowledge during the action, it must not be treated as another word for a plan.
The second thing strategy is not, is equally discomforting. Strategy is not equivalent to the pursuit of profit. The strategy involves the creation of a profitable competitive position made possible by particular capabilities developed by the organization.
A strategy is not the same as having a set of objectives. Setting aspirations for the organization is necessary but insufficient to qualify as a strategy.
What are the creative and cultural industries?
All organizational activity both takes place in and contributes to, the production of attitudes, beliefs, and values that pattern human behavior and understanding–in other words, culture, a system of understanding and learned behaviors that shape how we live and make sense of the experience.
Their products and services are similarly used and experienced through the user's and consumers' cultural knowledge and behavior. Equally, very few organizations do not require creativity to succeed, whether it be a creative approach to problem-solving, the generation of product lines, ways to market, the identification of new customer groups, or ways of managing or structuring the organization.
The creative and cultural industries are recognizable by how much of the value of the product is symbolic. How much, though subjective, is important, as many products contain some symbolic or meaning-based value.
Organizations that make up the CCI, however, involve the production of products or services that are mainly made up of symbolic benefits.
What makes the hat valued by the user is what it signifies, what message it sends the wearer and others who see him or her wearing it. The defining aspect of creativity necessary to separate some industries belonging to the creative industries from the host of organizations that employ creativity in their decision-making or production practices is not one of degree, but of legal form.
What is clear, though, is that the increasing use of digital technologies of reproduction and distribution means that the role of copyright in the organization of the CCI will come under increasing pressure as the argument that under digital conditions of reproduction and consumption it is no longer doing what it set out to do–encourage creativity–gains ground.
The Creative Commons is a set of licenses that can be variously applied to protect or exploit (or not) the work. Depending on the author’s view, a license to distribute (share) the work without restriction can be granted as long as it isn't for commercial gain.
While the use of the term information industries takes as its inspiration the increasing importance of the knowledge economy and emphasizes the information as opposed to the physical element of cultural products. Sometimes these labels are used to identify particular groupings of industries such as the arts industries and their focus on the visual and performing arts; at other times they are used to describe a very broad collection of sectors such as with the creative industries, which incorporates software development.
The CCI is a very risky business because the unclear relationship between production costs and sales revenues means that profit margins are difficult to predict and large losses can be made a situation made worse by the often highly skewed distribution of sales to a small number of products.