The creative industries idea is better than even its original perpetrators might have imagined, judging from the original mapping documents.

In their submission to the ABC and SBS Review, currently in progress, Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew argue that how national public broadcasters respond to changes in the media environment arising from digitisation, convergence and changing societal needs and expectations can be best understood as a question of social innovation.

Executive summary Creative skills are widely distributed across economies, but their contributions to economic performance and social outcomes and their role in enabling nations and institutions to respond to competitive and other pressures are not well understood.

“This false divide between the arts and science, between the arts and industry, between the arts and the economy: we’ve actually got to put that to bed. As if creativity is somehow this thing which only applies to the arts, and innovation is this thing over here which applies uniquely to the sciences, or technology...

The way researchers remain largely in disciplinary silos is a discouraging factor to anyone needing to work with colleagues in other disciplines, writes Stuart Cunningham.