Outline

International Creative Universities Network (ICUN)

Creative Economy – Creative University – Creative Development

Analyzing Knowledge Creation in Global Knowledge Societies

There are dramatic shifts in contemporary advanced economies as employment in primary and secondary sectors continue to decline, high-wage employment is concentrated in industry sectors that increasing deploy the fruits of the arts and sciences, and the creative sectors and the institutions that foster creativity move to centre stage.

The development of the knowledge and learning economies emphasizes the changing significance of intellectual capital and tacit knowledge in the forms of human, social and intellectual capital for economic growth and development manifesting the changing significance of intellectual capital and the thickening connections between forms of open knowledge production, creativity, and new Web 2.0 technologies. A number of terms describe the nature of the contemporary capitalism of advanced economies: ‘cognitive capitalism’, ‘metaphysical capitalism’, ‘intellectual capitalism’, ‘designer capitalism’. The ‘symbolic’ or ‘weightless’ economy has highlighted the general importance of symbolic, immaterial and digital goods and services for economic and cultural development and resulted in new labor markets with a demand for higher analytic skills and new markets in tradable knowledges. Developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) not only define globalization, they are changing the format, density and nature of the exchange and flows of knowledge, research and scholarship. Delivery modes in education are being reshaped. Global cultures are spreading in the form of knowledge and research networks. Openness and networking, cross-border people movement, flows of capital, portal cities and littoral zones, and new knowledge and learning systems with worldwide reach; all are changing the conditions of imagining and producing and the sharing of creative work in different spheres. The economic aspect of creativity refers to the production of new ideas, aesthetic forms, scholarship, original works of art and cultural products, as well as scientific inventions and technological innovations. It embraces open source communication as well as commercial intellectual property. The digitization, speed and compression of communication has reshaped delivery modes in higher education, reinforced the notion of culture as a symbolic system and led to the spread of global cultures as knowledge cultures and collaborative research networks. This research will investigate all the aspects of education in (and as) the creative economy with the objective of extending the dialogue about the relationship between contemporary higher education and the changing face of contemporary economies.

Analyzing Knowledge Cultures of the „Creative Economy“

The digitalization, speed and compression of communication has reshaped delivery modes of higher education; reinforced the notion of culture as a symbolic system; and led to the spread of global cultures as knowledge and research networks.  These developments have been noted for some time and over the last fifty years there have been many labels used to describe the development of the ‘knowledge economy,’ a term that emerged and solidified with the OECD (1996) report The Knowledge-based Economy. It is possible to distinguish a number of different strands and readings of the knowledge economy, for example: (1) the standard or received business model associated with knowledge management prevalent in the 1980s and thereafter; (2) economic value of knowledge studies based on Fritz Machlup’s (1962,1970) studies of the production and distribution of knowledge in the early 1960s; (3) ‘Technological revolution’ studies popularised by scholars such as Daniel Bell (1973), Alain Touraine (1971) and Alvin Toffler (1980) in the 1970s based on the sociology of ‘post-industrialism’; (4) postmodernity as late capitalism characterized by Jean-François Lyotard (1984) and others; (5) OECD’s (1996) model based on endogenous growth theory based on Romer’s (1986) work; (6) the World Bank’s ‘Knowledge for Development’ and ‘Education for the Knowledge Economy’ developed under Joseph Stiglitz (1999a,b); (7) ‘new economy’ readings of the 1990s; (8) Mark Granovetter’s (1973) theorizing of the role of information in the market based on weak ties and social networks; (9) the learning economy based on Bengt-Åke Lundvall’s work (1992); (10) the digital or ‘weightless’ economy proposed by Danny Quah (2003) and others; (11) global information society based on the World Summit (WSIS); (12) postmodern global systems theory based on network theory after Manuel Castells (1996). It is an important intellectual task not only to provide a chronological order for these readings but also to recognize their different political values and assumptions. Clearly, not all are based on neoliberal fundamentals; some predate neoliberalism and others provide a critique of neoliberal conceptions of globalization.

While there are different readings and accounts of the knowledge economy it is really only since the OECD´s (1996) use of the label in the mid 1990s and its adoption as a major policy description/prescription and strategy by the United Kingdom in 1999, that the term passed into the policy literature as an acceptable and increasingly widely used term. The ‘creative economy’ is an adjunct policy term that is based on many of the same economic arguments and especially the centrality of theoretical knowledge and the significance of innovation. Most definitions highlight the growing relative significance of knowledge compared to traditional factors of production--natural resources, physical capital and low skill labor—in wealth creation, and the importance of knowledge creation as a source of competitive advantage to all sectors of the economy with a special emphasis on R&D, higher education, and knowledge-intensive industries like the media and entertainment industries.

New studies of the ‘creative economy’ grow out of a long gestation of blended discourses that go back at least to the early literatures in the economics of knowledge initiated by Friedrich von Hayek and Fritz Machlup in the 1940s and 1950s, to studies of the ‘information economy’ by Marc Porat in the late 1960s, and to the sociology of postindustrialism, a discourse developed differently by Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine in the early 1970s. The creative economy also highlights and builds upon important ideas given a distinctive formulation by Paul Romer under the aegis of endogenous growth theory in the 1990s, and aspects of the emerging literatures concerning national systems of innovations and entrepreneurship that figure in public policy formulation from the 1980s. Indeed, the notion of the ‘creative economy’ sits within a complicated and interconnected set of discourses that rapidly succeed, replace and overlap one another.

The creative economy discourse combines elements from the earlier theories and formulations providing a recipe and policy mix that highlights creativity, innovation, distributive knowledge systems, social production and networking, the creative commons and the new communication technologies, along with an emphasis on the cultural and creative sector industries, cultural policy, and the emphasis on human and social capital formation especially through organizational learning, corporate training, and education at all levels (UNESCO 2005). Buried in this discourse and its rapid uptake in public policy is an implicit account about the shifting nature of capitalism or at least of its leading sectors and also an attempt to promote and develop new forms of higher education that cultivate a new spirit of enterprise and the enterprise curriculum, give a new emphasis to the entrepreneurial subject, encourage teaching for giftedness and creativity, prioritize accelerated and personal learning, and lend weight to ‘consumer-citizens’ and a new ethic of self-presentation and self-promotion.

1. The Promotion of Knowledge as a global public good

The first set of principles concerning knowledge as an economic good indicates that knowledge defies traditional understandings of property and principles of exchange and closely conforms to criteria for a public good. Thus, knowledge at the ideation or immaterial stage considered as pure ideas operates expansively to defy the law of scarcity. It does not conform to the traditional criteria of an economic good and the economics of knowledge is therefore not based on an understanding of those features that characterize property or exchange and cannot be based on economics as the science of the allocation of scarce public goods.

2. The Role of Creative Universities in structural knowledge transformation

The notion of the knowledge economy characterizes possible forms of structural transformation where “the rapid creation of new knowledge and the improvement of access to the knowledge bases thus constituted, in every possible way (education, training, transfer of technological knowledge, diffusion of innovations), are factors increasing economic efficiency, innovation, the quality of goods and services, and equity between individuals, social categories, and generations” (Foray, 2004) The Creative Universities knowledge network will encourage reflection on the changed the conditions of production and transmission of knowledge and information and the accelerating speed at which knowledge is created and accumulated through the development of internationalization.

3. The Development of New Institutional Forms

Profound changes in the nature of technology are giving rise to powerful new models of social production based on community, collaboration, and self-organization rather than on hierarchy and control where employees engage in peer-to-peer collaboration driving the process of innovation; customers become ‘prosumers’ co-creating goods and services; new supply chains are emerging where risk is distributed; smart new Web companies harnessing the new architectures for collaboration focus on the new ethos of participation and openness aimed at realizing real value for participants.

4. Understanding The Science of Peer Production

The term ‘social media’ only emerged late in the 2000s when commentators recognized that people’s and especially youth’s desire to connect and a collection of interrelated P2P interactive technologies and architectures embodying a principle of decentralization underlying the Internet often expressed ideologically by the term ‘Web 2.0’ allowed for the creation and exchange of user-created content (UCC). These three trends —people’s desire to connect, new interactive technologies, and online economics—have created a new phenomenon variously described as ‘groundswell’ (Li & Bernoff, 2008), ‘wisdom of the crowd’ (Surowiecki, 2004), ‘mass collaboration’ (Tapscott & Williams, 2006), ‘the blogging revolution’ (Wyld, 2007). Surowiecki (2004) discusses the wisdom of crowds in relation to four criteria: diversity of opinion, independence (of thought), decentralization and aggregation. These elements apply to thinking and information processing (cognition), optimizing behavior flows within a culture (coordination), and forming decentred networks based on trust (cooperation).

With Web 2.0, there is a deep transformation occurring wherein the web has become a truly participatory media; instead of going on the web to read static content, we can more easily create and share our own ideas and creations. The rise of what has been alternately referred to as consumer- or user-generated media (content) has been hailed as being truly groundbreaking in nature. Blogging and social networking with the facility of user-generated content has created a revolutionary new social media that characterizes Web 2.0 as the newest phase of the Internet. The new interactive technologies and peer-to-peer architectures have democratized writing and imaging and, thereby, also creativity itself, enabling anyone with access to a computer to become a creator of their own digital content. Writers and video-makers as ‘content creators’ are causing a fundamental shift from the age of information to the age of interaction and recreating themselves in the process.  Sometimes this contrast is given in terms of a distinction between ‘industrial media’, ‘broadcast’ or ‘mass’ media which is highly centralized, hierarchical and vertical based on one-to-many logic versus social media which is decentralized (without a central server), non-hierarchical or peer-governed, and horizontal based on many-to-many interaction.

The Creative Universities Network aims to examine the possibilities for the development of user-generated cultures within higher education as a means for enhancing peer-to-peer learning systems for students and faculty.

5. Web 2.0 and New Design Epistemologies

One strand of the emerging literature highlights the role of the creative, cultural and expressive arts, of performance and aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure or epistemology for the creative economy. Another strand focuses on the architecture and design associated with Web 2.0 and the semantic web and the way a host of new platforms enable Web-enabled knowledge services and knowledge trading as well as supporting innovation, creativity, collaboration, social production and information sharing. Web 2.0 refers to a class of Web-based applications that share certain design patterns often expressed in a series of oppositions between directories and tag systems, Web site stickiness and RSS syndication, content management systems and wikis, screen scraping and open Web APIs, personal Web pages and blogs, and client/server style publishing and massive user participation. Web 2.0 applications weave together different Web-accessible data and services, depend on collective intelligence, social networks, and user-contributed content and tags, address long-tail markets, remix Web-based data, and enhance existing Web-based data with personalization capabilities.

It is these applications that encourage scholars to talk more broadly about the change in the mode of social production towards a new kind of freedom based on convergences between open course, open access, and the creative commons. Perhaps, more than any other this strand based around Web 2.0 developments with the democratic goal of encouraging all user-participants to create, share, distribute, and enjoy ideas and information, that brings commerce and creativity together in educational settings, not only in terms of education as a source and research center for creative applications for Web-based systems but also as spin-off university companies and, even more importantly, as a market subject to endless fashion gadgetry and redesign.

6. Creative Universities and Open Science

Much that has been written on e-science tends towards technical and engineering discourses with a focus on the application of an enhanced technological infrastructure for the transmission, processing and storing of digital data and information. Yet the scale and effectiveness of global collaboration in scientific research depends on non-technological considerations including the increasing importance of openness in all its forms—open access, open science governance, open peer production, open peer review, open collaboration and open innovation. The fundamental characteristics of open science have been described as: Openness to ‘experience’; Openness to criticism; Openness to interpretation; Openness to the Other; Open science communication technologies; Openness=freedom; Open peer governance (Peters, 2009). As the European Research Council suggested in its Guidelines to Open Access (2007): “Scientific research is generating vast, ever increasing quantities of information, including primary data, data structured and integrated into databases, and scientific publications. In the age of the Internet, free and efficient access to information, including scientific publications and original data, will be the key for sustained progress.”

At the 2012 European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities Annual Meeting, "Open infrastructures for Open Science" Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, noted “we are just now beginning to realise how significant a transformation of science the openness enabled by ICT infrastructures can mean. We start the era of open science.” She also indicated that subscription-based models for access to research publications should not continue to be dominant in an era where distribution costs approach zero. She concludes with a very string message:  “let's invest in the collaborative tools that let us progress. Let's tear down the walls that keep learning sealed off. And let's make science open.”

The Wellcome Trust (UK), which provides £400 million (US$636 million) a year in funds for research on human and animal health, announced on 10 April that it too would throw its weight behind efforts by scientists to make their work freely available to all. It indicated that it would launch its own free online publication to compete with existing academic journals in an effort to force publishers to increase free access. Nearly 9,000 researchers signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing, initiated by Tim Gowers, the British mathematician as part of a campaign that supporters call the 'academic spring', due to its aim to revolutionise the spread of knowledge.

The Creative Universities network will explore the connections and interrelationships between creativity and forms of openness.