Nodes of Creativity

This study focuses on the importance of soft creative cluster infrastructures for the creative practices of creative small medium enterprises. Nowadays, clustering of creative activities in urban areas occurs on a large scale. Public and private intervention in the development of these creative clusters is very common, as the presence of a creative cluster in an urban district is considered to be beneficial for their regeneration effects and direct economic outputs. Also, creative clusters are believed to be beneficial towards the stimulation of a wider innovative, creative ecosystem, which is highly needed in the current knowledge economy, as competition for price and productivity is increasingly been replaced by competition for the ability to innovate and create. Over the past year, there emerged however a growing criticism among academics on top-down cluster development, as these clusters are accused of missing out on real cluster benefits by simply co-locating creative industry activities, without ensuring interlinkages or network effects. This new line of critique, together with the rising academic interest in collaborative networks and soft creative cluster infrastructures form the basis of the empirical part of this study. In the empirical part, three themes are discussed, based on 15 interviews with both creative SME’s and creative cluster managers. These three themes are: presence of interlinkages and network effects, need for soft creative cluster infrasructure and management of soft creative cluster infrastructure. Overall can be concluded that a soft creative cluster infrastructure is no basic requirement for creative SME’s to survive. However, when it comes to reaching for a higher level of professionalism, innovation capacity and creativity, the presence of a soft creative cluster infrastructure is important in order to stimulate interlinkages between the creative firms located in the creative cluster. The most significant part of the soft creative cluster infrastructure is the learning infrastructure, as knowledge exchange is highly important to the creative practices of creative SME’s. The most common and desired way of exchanging knowledge is learning by doing and peer-review. Also diversity among the creative firms in the clusters is crucial, as the presence of interlinkages between creative SME’s in various sectors enhances the creative and inspiring atmosphere, which stimulates the creative SME’s to use different materials or to adopt different, new approaches to their own work. Another important finding of this study is the fact that a relatively small amount of soft creative cluster factors is currently present within the three studied top-down managed creative clusters. Creative SME’s prefer the soft creative cluster infrastructure to be organized by the creative cluster manager. However, the cluster managers indicate to be almost fully occupied by the organization of the hard creative cluster infrastructure, both financially and timewise. As current creative cluster managers do not account for the organization and management of soft creative cluster infrastructures, the field is now subsequently challenged to find a wider recognition for the importance of the organization of soft creative infrastructures, as well as to develop alternative forms of organizing and financing soft creative cluster infrastructures.