Ian is one of Creative Cardiff’s co-founders. Here he explains his part in Creative Cardiff’s creation. Ian’s interests include the creative economy, media, journalism, intellectual property and the impact of digital communications technologies.
Ian writes:
For reasons more complicated than can be fully explained here, I found myself at the back end of 2010 in conversation with Professor Justin Lewis, then Head of what is now called the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC) at Cardiff University. We were discussing jobs. Having spent most of my working life as a journalist, based in Bradford, London or New York, I had also for some years enjoyed a significant relationship with JOMEC, but in 2010 I was coming to the end of a stint at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where as Director of Strategic Communications I worked for Foreign Secretary David Miliband, whose term of office ended with Labour’s defeat in the May 2010 General Election.
During my time at the Foreign Office, I had somehow managed also to author a report on creative industries in Wales. Published in March 2010, we called it: The Heart of Digital Wales: a review of creative industries in Wales. Great title. It urged Wales to seize its opportunities in the booming national and international creative economy, where the internet was tearing apart the rules of the game. Amid the disruption of news, film, television, the arts, sport and much else, there was always a chance of innovating your way to success. I suggested as a job title for myself: Professor of Digital Economy and we quickly completed the deal, starting work in October 2010.
The decade which followed, 2010-2020, saw sustained out-performance in growth of the UK creative economy, defined as the value of the creative work done across the whole economy (rather than confining this calculation to compute only the healthily growing value of output in the creative industries). Working with colleagues at Nesta, we co-authored A Manifesto for the Creative Economy, published in 2013. This work coincided with my involvement in one of the four UK Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Ours was a Wales and the West of England project led by Professor Jonathan Dovey from UWE, the University of the West of England, best known by its abbreviated title: REACT. From REACT, we learned much about partnership, combining high energy and leadership with the curiosity and sensitivity to understand your partners’ aspirations. REACT’s end of programme report said its most lasting legacy would be “this network of agile connectivity.”
Looking back, it’s not too hard to see why by 2015, we were eager to get on with Creative Cardiff.
All we needed was a brilliant team of people. We got that too. Now they rightly ask: what took you so long?
