Cultural and creative industries

Cultural industries add additional economic value to creative work, at the same time generating new value, for individuals and societies. The cultural and economic duality of these industries is their main distinguishing sign. While potentially contributing to the preservation and promotion of cultural diversity, as well as to the democratization of access to culture, they are significant deposits for employment and the creation of wealth. They encourage creativity, which is their basic “raw material”, but they also enable innovation in terms of production and distribution. In many countries, during the 1990s, their growth was exponential in terms of job creation and contribution to GDP. The challenge of globalization and digital technologies offer new and important opportunities for their development.

This affirmation of the economic value of culture in no way excludes the logics of cooperation focusing on development and the structuring of the artistic and cultural fields of partners in the South and other regions in the world.

What does Cultural and Creative Industry (CCI) mean?

1. All archetypal cultural activities, or non-industrial activities that produce copyright-protected prototypes. There is a continuity between these purely artistic activities and the level of cultural and creative industries.
 visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, crafts and especially arts and crafts, etc.),
 performing arts (theatre, dance, circus, street art, etc.),
 heritage (museums, libraries, archaeological and historic sites, archives, etc.).

2. Cultural industries, or industrial activities aimed at mass reproduction but the creations of which are copyright-protected.
 film and video,
 television and radio,
 video games,
 music (recorded music and live concert),
 writing (book publishing and newspaper and magazine publishing).

3. Creative industries, or activities that are variably industrial or prototypical. Creations are protected by copyright or other intellectual property rights.
 design (fashion, graphic, product, interior design, etc.)
 architecture,
 advertising,
 luxury goods industries (fashion, perfume, etc.)
 tourism,
 educational industries (traditional and digital manuals, school support, online training, etc.).

4. Support and communication industries: this category is polymorphous and combines support, services and content. It depends on the performances of the previous categories.
 The Internet and digital technologies,
 Manufacturers of computers, portable music players, mobile telephones, etc.

Issues

The transformations in the cultural and creative industries are symbolic of the changes underway to rationalize and modernize our cultural actions abroad. The issues are significant. All of the observers state that the cultural economics sector, in all parts of the world, is the one that presents the most deposits of wealth, jobs, opportunities for social integration and development.

However, globalization in the cultural sector, via digital technology, is not risk-free for cultural and linguistic diversity, for North-South balance, for enforcement of intellectual property rights, etc.

Through its interest in cultural and creative industries and in searches for cultural impacts and economic effects, the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, in collaboration with its institutional and professional partners, focuses on two closely related objectives:
 pursuing a strategy aimed at promoting and disseminating French cultural production abroad in all its diversity. This involves attempting to achieve, through this diversity, a variety of new audiences beyond the traditional, French-speaking target. Young audiences are naturally a priority.
 supporting our cultural and creative industries in their projects abroad by making it easier for creators and their productions to move around and by encouraging the attractiveness of foreign creators and entrepreneurs.

France’s position

The role of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, via the Sous-Direction de la diversité culturelle et du patrimoine mondial (Sub-Directorate of Cultural Diversity and World Heritage), is that of “intermediator” between French professionals and their foreign counterparts and facilitator of mobility and attractiveness.

To this end, it applies itself to:
 setting up balanced partnerships with French professionals on the basis of mechanisms of regular concerted action to follow a fast-changing sector,
 promoting work at the interministerial level to remove barriers to mobility,
 monitoring the tools developed nationally (Ministry of Culture and Communication, Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Employment, etc.) and within international organizations (European Union, UNESCO, Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie [International Organization for the French-Speaking World], etc.),
 mobilizing transversely all of the agents (multifunctional or specialized) of the French cultural centres, economic missions, research centres on convergent objectives.

^{Updated on 17.03.10}