Knowledge Relationships and Transactions in a Cultural Economy: Analysing the Creative Industries Ecosystem

This paper addresses creativity in a broad organisational field of knowledge relationships and transactions in a cultural economy. In considering key issues and debates across this complex field, the paper concentrates on the generic problems of investigating, understanding and influencing this cultural economy. The paper locates its consideration of these knowledge relationships and transactions in a discussion of a pioneering in-depth study of the creative industries in a region of the United Kingdom. Significantly, this study found these creative industries to be inhabiting an ecosystem of creative space and also found that the development strategy for these industries needed to be ecological. The paper concludes with several key challenges for research and policy in the building of situated and strategic knowledge on cultural economies.