The University of Strathclyde is a partner in a new UK-wide centre launched to maintain the country’s position as a world leader in culture and the creative industries.
The Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology (CREATe) will carry out research into the business models and regulation of industries such as music, film, TV, computer games and publishing. It will bring together for the first time researchers from the fields of law, business, economics, technology, psychology and cultural analysis. Together they will develop solutions to the challenges of business practice and copyright in the creative industries.
The CREATe consortium comprises seven UK universities and more than 80 industry and arts sector partners. Led at and hosted by the University of Glasgow, the partners include the Universities of Strathclyde, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Nottingham and St Andrews and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Lilian Edwards, Professor of E-Governance Law at the University of Strathclyde and Deputy Director of CREATe, said: “One of the key parts of our strategy is to work closely with industry and individual creators and artists. We already have more than 80 industry partners, ranging from bestselling authors like Neil Gaiman and Charles Stross to events like the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games and the Edinburgh International Festival, and international collaborators like the Universities of Stanford and Berkeley.
“We are genuinely multidisciplinary as a team, and will be building innovative technological solutions. Creativity is one of the UK’s major success stories, even in the recession; we want to help creators, policy makers and businesses build a UK cultural, business and regulatory infrastructure that might produce the next Google, Apple or Facebook.”
CREATe will train the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers for the creative economy – the first major UK effort to systematically build such research capacity. It plans to help legislators by providing evidence for key policy decisions on controversial issues such as file sharing and infringement, and will also look at how user rights to privacy are guaranteed in the digital age.
CREATe is an £8 million research centre supported by £5 million of funding over the next four years from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Economic and Research Council (ESRC). More at www.create.ac.uk
9 August 2012