John Howkins about the future of creativity

The passion for creativity and innovation has radically altered our attitudes to learning and is changing how governments function. Fifteen years after the British government launched the idea of creative industries, many countries and cities have joined the ‘creative rush’. Recently John Howkins, Chairman of BOP Consulting and Visiting Professor at City University London (also Vice Dean and Visiting Professor at the the Shanghai School of Creativity) gave an inaugural lecture at City University. He provides an inside view of creativity and business based on his Shanghai research centre and what the developments could mean for the future of London.

John, who is creative?
Everybody is creative. For me, creativity is a mark of humanitiy. It’s part of being normal.  Everything is crossed by creativity. Entertainment, business, software – everything.

Really?
Everybody is born with imagination and with the passion to use it. That’s the first of my three principles of creative ecologies. The question is what happens in the brain, in the mind. The second principle is that this creativity needs freedom. We want to express our ideas, enjoy it, share it. We want to manage our relationship to ideas and sometimes to have control over our ideas.

And the third principle?
Freedom needs markets. So, here we see the creative economy. We need access to markets and we need the markets to be fair. Whether or not markets are open and fair depends on 8 themes: people’s needs, management, competition and risks, education, learning, cities, digital, copyright.

Please tell me more about the needs.
Abraham Maslow identified a hierarchy of personal needs, from food and survival to emotions and knowledge and from repetition to novelty. At the top of his hierarchy he put our need for self-fulfilment. Right at the end of his life he replaced ‚self-fufilment’ with two needs: our need for beauty, which he called the aesthetic, and our need for knowledge which he called cognitive. I think he’s right, that the creative ecology is largely driven by our love of art and our desire for knowledge. Sometimes they come together and sometimes they are in tension. As people begin to express these new needs, new companies arise to meet these needs, changing their products or changing from making products to providing services and experiences.  They put the emphasis on quality and sensation rather than on quantity and price. This needs new kinds of management and leadership.

Quite sure here hide some of the new leaders | photo by. S.D.

New in what way?
In 2010 IBM did a worldwide survey of 1600 CEOs in over 60 countries. I love their conclusion, Creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experiment. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.’ That’s a remarkable statement.

What about the relationships?
I was a director of a film company for many years and also had a time when I was reviewing pay-tv contracts for Universal Studios. I know from my experience that in film and TV the main business every day is negotiating contracts serially with the same people again and again. The company’s assets, revenues, margins and profits depend entirely on the kind of personal relationships you need in order to negotiate successfully.  This has a direct impact on a company’s structure, recruitment, skills and remuneration. The nature of the contract process affects the way the firm operates, rather than the other way around.   

Thus the risks are with the creatives?
I think creativity is the most competitive kind of economic activity. There are business risks and psychological risks. Having ideas is a lonely business. It is a personal choice – and it’s a difficult choice. Some people relish this, but some people want security and safety. In my view creative people, the first group, are unavoidably creating an economy of failure. People fail much more often trying to be creative than in other kinds of work.

This includs is a lot of learning, doesn’t it?
It does, and for everybody in all kind of industries. Learning is different from education and is more important. It is is self-driven, self-motivated, voluntary and continues until you die. It’s interesting to look at people and organisations to see if they have a capacity to learn.

John Howkins at City University | photo by S.D.

Why did you focus on cities?
Of course there is an historic relation between cities and creativity. But there is also a new factor: the focus of government intervention that was previously centred on national governments has now shifted from what national policy can do to what cities can do down to small neighbourhoods and clusters. Even, to what can individuals do. Neighbourhood. Networking. The action takes place by individuals in a particular place, in the real world as well as digital. We really have no idea what an individual, thinking through their own ideas, thinking freely, is going to do.  

Is there a need of redefine what’s creativity?
The British government defined creative industries in 1997.  It was a great achievement but actually it is rather an unsatisfactory definition and it prevents us from understanding how creativity actually operates and what kind of economic activities may result. One reason why I’m sort of sceptical of the process is that it seems to me that we need to move beyond the idea of industries. Creativity is a fundamental human attitude. It’s never industrial. It may result in nothing at all, or innovation, or an industrial output. We have to be clear what we are talking about. Creativity is personal and subjective, it has a taste! So it’s not innovation, because innovation is objective and repeatable.

Anything you’d like to end up with?
Let’s say it with Walt Disney: The future is not waiting to be discovered. It is created, first in the mind and then in activity.