Shaping Creative Atmospheres - When Art & Business collide to create innovation

Over the last two decades, policies concerning Creative Industries (CIs) have spread widely at international, European, national, regional and local level. Governments have hence started looking as CIs as to tools to ensure the growth and development of their economies, as they represent a recognised source of employment and innovation. Along the way, though, the policy discourse might have morphed into a ‘mere’ rhetoric, losing some of its significance. As actions and programmes concerning CIs go on repeating themselves without a confrontation with the everyday life of the sector, the gap between the two keeps widening. The risk is that of generating policies which no longer involve the activities at the core of CIs, and are therefore unable to sustain their development. This document examines the most salient aspects of the discrepancy, in order to propose a model that might help bridge the divide.