OK, so here’s a shot across the bows of the industry sector I have worked in for much of my career. The contention – that, despite the funny haircuts, oversize glasses and three-quarter length skinny trousers, much of what we describe as the ‘creative industry’ is inherently conservative and ‘creative’ only within some very tight boundaries. Creatives, generally, aren’t innovative.
Take the film industry. The world of sequels, remakes and tv spin-offs. Or the theatre industry; pastiche musicals lovingly constructed from the back catalogues of successful pop acts and remakes of old films. Or the tv industry where the biggest growth in the past ten years has been in the art of the format: take a successful tv programme and franchise the life out of it. Or the music industry, where 60s/70s/80s revivals revolve through the years.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the output of any of those industries is necessarily bad – some of it is, some of it’s so-so and some of it is fantastic (and we all draw our own conclusions about artistic merit). But what I am saying is that most of it is usually fairly derivative and, moreover, the way much of the ‘creative industry’ is run makes it that way.
I think that there are a two reasons for this; commercial pressure and accepted wisdom.
The former category is easy enough to understand. The entertainment media have tended to be run on principals of portfolio management: back a number of properties, some will be disasters, most merely mediocre and a few successful beyond wildest dreams. Whilst I was at the BBC there were a few heavily backed successes (Walking with Dinosaurs and Teletubbies, for example), a few well backed catastrophes (Gormenghast, anyone?) and a very few surprise hits (The Office).
In a world where people are less and less willing to take business risks, the inevitability is that more backing is put into more certain successes, and the number of surprise hits gets less and less. This is the processification (ergh, sorry!) of the creative industries. Manage out variation from process to enable a more consistent return.
The second reason, accepted wisdom, is something that the creative world has in common with science. In science, people like Copernicus were shunned by their peers because they proposed radical ways of thinking that were too much for the body of scientific opinion to take on board. It took a generation to die out for a new set of minds to take a revolutionary theory on board and move it forward. Likewise in art, many of the greatest artists died in poverty as their influence was only exerted after the establishment died out. The creative industries may not need generations to actually pop their clogs, but it’s probably not far off from the truth.
Underlying all of this is a distinction between the concepts of Creativity and Innovation. The two can be confused, but whilst a Creative can be creative in creating something beautiful yet conservative, very few Creatives innovate to do something really different…
mmitII 
Creatives are creative within a very tightly defined brief because the people who run the world (financiers) have realised that creatives have no innate commercial sense and that without a very tight brief they will simply devour large quantities of the financiers money. Creatives slowly learn to curtail their innovative urges and principles in line with the realisation they need the financiers investment and thus the only way they can be sustainably creative is to play within the financiers rules… 🙂
Regarding innovation vs creativity, can you be innovative within a set of imposed constraints?
In a world that is fundamentally derivative, it is increasingly difficult to innovate. Your point about commercial pressure is correct. What has happened is that, the so-called creative sectors are run by businessmen who are trying to bottle the genie. The approach is based upon the notion that 'creativity' has a formula. No one is prepared to countenance any kind of failure and in this environment people are reluctant to take risks. Left to its own devices, the 'creative industry' will generally rely on mavericks to make up great stuff in their heads (see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – no one really knew why Douglas Adams was employed by the BBC and then he turned up with that manuscript!). This scares the sh*t out of investors!