Libraries and the Creative Economy

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Libraries and the Creative Economy
Charles Leadbeater
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The Creative Economy

• What is creativity and where does it come from?
• Is it the creative class, industries, economy or
  society ?
• Two different stories of creativity

Open Innovation
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Closed Innovation Organisations

• Hire bright people
• Put them in special conditions
• Free from market pressures
• Pipeline of ideas to products
• Delivered to passive waiting consumers

Open Innovation
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Closed Innovation Assumptions

• Knowledge is created, codified, sent and received
• Authors of inventions can define their use
• Intellectual property should be protected to
  create incentives
• Consumption is passive - a yes/no choice
• Innovation comes from within, self-reflective
  process

Open Innovation
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Closed Innovation Applications

• The R D Lab Thomas J Watson, Bell Labs
• Specialist creative activities in companies
• Professional disciplines of architecture and
  design
• Elite university education
• The knowledge value chain

Open Innovation
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Closed Innovation Breaking Down?

• Rise and spread of new sources of ideas and
  know-how
• Able to connect more easily outside large
  organisations
• Professional knowledge challenged by Pro-Ams
• Consumers become participants through innovation
  in use
• Old organisational forms outmoded

Open Innovation
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Open Innovation Generation

• Multiplying sources of ideas
• Technology costs down
• Combining ideas in networks easier
• Skilled labour more mobile, independent
• End of knowledge monopolies

Open Innovation
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Open Innovation Propagation

• Consumers are increasingly innovators
• Radical innovations the users work out what
  innovation is for
• Disruptive innovation passionate users innovate,
  producers follow
• New markets and business models start in marginal
  markets
• Service innovation requires users to rewrite
  scripts
• Leisure economy Pro-Am users and serious leisure

Open Innovation
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Open Innovation Assumptions

• Innovation essential social and dynamic
• Authorship joint, complex and evolutionary
• Knowledge created by interaction
• Innovation as a mass activity
• The audience wants to take to the stage

Open Innovation
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Open Innovation Applications

• Open source communities
• Community/commons based production
• Byond blogging citizen journalists, scientists,
  innovators
• Networked companies/platform innovators
• Clusters and networks in regions
• Cities as open innovation systems
• Structured communities of co-creation achieve
  complex tasks

Open Innovation
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The library and creativity ?

• Public libraries as precursors of open innovation
• Ease of access
• Ready to use tools
• Common resource for private use
• Public platform for cumulative innovation
• Peer to peer lending

Open Innovation
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The library and creativity ?

• Public libraries special people in special
  places
• Defined by peculiar rituals
• Off putting for outsiders
• Defined and organised by and perhaps for
  professionals
• Limited opportunities for co-creation, rule bound
  
• Inflexible fixed assets

Open Innovation
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Institutions and professions in the middle

• The BBC and Big J journalism
• Traditional research institutions public and
  private
• Knowledge based professionals doctors, teachers

Open Innovation
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The library and creativity the future?

• Reform of the traditional model
• new services, technology, attractions,
  architecture, locations, names
• Searching for new hybrids
• decentralised, jointly located services, more
  collaborative self help ethos
• But mainly about saving incumbents, reforming
  current institutions

Open Innovation
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The library and creativity the future?

• New open models of public services
• radical new ways to enact basic library
  principles and values
• new organisational models, new relations
  professionals and users

Open Innovation
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The library and creativity the future?

• Design principles for future public services
• Co-created users as co-producers, contributors
• Distributed tools, finance and resources,
  following choices
• Collaborative, peer-to-peer
• New roles for professionals
• Personalised
• Conversational
• Designed to evolve, modular, evolutionary

Open Innovation