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Businesses Need Creative Clusters to Draw Best, Brightest

Billed as “The Creative Imperative,” the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, changed the worldwide discussion.

“To make sense of a rapidly changing world and to connect the seemingly unconnected,” says Klaus Schwab, founder of the Davos forum, “a greater emphasis on human imagination, innovation and creativity … must be the key differentiators for business.”

This is a singular recognition of just how much technology has changed our world.

More than five years ago, Business Week reported that “the industrial economy is giving way to the creative economy and corporations are at another crossroads.”

“Attributes that made them ideal for the 20th century could cripple them in the 21st; they will have to change dramatically. The main struggle of daily business will be won by the people and the organizations that adapt most successfully to the new world that is unfolding,” the magazine said.

One only has to follow the recent history of the Ford Motor Co. to understand how very difficult this process can be.

Today, corporations and the communities they serve must put themselves at the forefront of this sweeping change in the structure of the world in which we live and work. It is imperative that we begin in earnest to attract, retain and nurture the most creative and innovative work force we know we need; and in the process, create a new overlay of our land-use planning too.

Michael Porter, in his book “The Competitive Advantage of Nations,” first published in 1990, pointed out the importance of “economic clusters.” These “geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers and associated institutions in a particular field that are present in a nation or region” are central, he argued, to survival. Porter championed the cluster concept and communities around the world eagerly embraced it. Looking back, it was key to the success of many industries and to competitive community development worldwide. As we talk about the development of creative industries today and the foreshadowing of a whole economy based upon creativity and innovation , the dawn of the “Creative Age,” as the Nomura Research Institute put it , we are more acutely aware of the importance of a new overlay called the “creative cluster.”

As early as 1985, the Washington, D.C., think tank Partners for Livable Communities identified Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N.C.; Oakland; and Chattanooga, Tenn., as cities that undertook efforts to create an industry culture by cajoling or otherwise attracting key segments of the cluster to move or locate geographically to form a hub for “transmitting and augmenting personal knowledge quickly.” For this reason they are cited by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, among others, as leapfrogging other cities by capitalizing on the advantages of “proximity and collaboration.”

Partners for Livable Communities assessed links between quality of life and the economic success of cities, and concluded “cities that are not livable places are not likely to perform economic functions in the future.”

In the Creative Age, developing the creative cluster, like Porter’s earlier industrial or economic cluster, is equally important because art and culture are central to ensuring vibrant economic activity and to business success in the 21st century knowledge economy and society.

Those communities placing a premium on cultural, ethnic and artistic diversity, and reinventing their knowledge factories for the Creative Age will likely burst with creativity and entrepreneurial fervor.


John M. Eger, Van Deerlin chairman of communications and public policy at San Diego State University, was editor of the “Smart Community Guidebook,” published by the state of California in 1999, and most recently, “The Creative Community,” SDSU Press.

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