Creative startups driving growth of digital economy

The rise of the digital economy and the growth of a technologically sophisticated creative workforce in countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia have allowed entrepreneurial artists and other creative workers to establish small businesses to develop new products and new modes for cultural expression and dissemination. It is these innovative startups that can provide the dynamism to fuel the growth of the creative industries, contributing to rising levels of output in the cultural goods and services sector, and stimulating employment and exports. This has already begun to happen in China, and there is every prospect that the Chinese economy will witness these sorts of developments to a greater extent over time.

It is appropriate to say that when culture meets technology, interesting things happen that are not just confined to the cultural sector. The sorts of adventures in the digital environment that creative artists undertake are providing essential content for the many new modes of cultural consumption that are expanding every day. And in the production economy, creative ideas generated by artists diffuse outward from the core arts industries to stimulate production and job creation in other industries in the cultural sector, and beyond in the economy at large. There is considerable scope for governments to implement well-planned cultural policies to facilitate this growth.

David Throsby is a researcher at Macquarie University, Sydney.