Stuart Cunningham

Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, based at Queensland University of Technology.

‘Mobile media and the creative economy’

ABSTRACT

Mobile media and the Internet offer fascinating opportunities for exciting work within cultural, communication and media studies. They also have attracted significant attention within new fields of economics and business analysis concerned with searching out the conditions for ‘creative disruption’ and the role of ‘disruptive technologies’ in contemporary societies.

This work focuses on how economies grow as complex open systems rather
than on static allocative efficiency. It may also provide a clearer understanding of the way in which new technologies are integrated into an economy and the restructuring of organizations, industries, markets and consumer lifestyles the growth/change process requires. The hypothesis is that the digital content and applications end of the creative industries may be ‘pure’ cases of service sector innovation. They may play this role by integrating and transforming new technologies into new services and introducing variety in the economy by the continuous flows of novelty (in content or design, for example) into the broader economy.

This address will focus on introducing these new strands of economic thinking into the debate about the cultural, economic and social impacts and effects of mobile media and the Internet, while also exploring the implications of this approach for positioning the creative industries as a driver of innovation.

Professor Stuart Cunningham is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, based at Queensland University of Technology. This centre draws on contributions across the humanities, creative arts and social sciences to help build a more dynamic and inclusive innovation system in Australia. He is known for his contributions to media, communications and cultural studies and works to promote their relevance to industry practice and government policy. He is the author or editor of several books and major reports, the latest (2006) being The Media and Communications in Australia (edited with Graeme Turner) and What Price a Creative Economy? He has served as a Commissioner of the Australian Film Commission and Chair of QPIX, Queensland's Screen Development Centre, and is currently Treasurer of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a board member of the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS), and a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC)’s College of Experts.