The Rise of the Creative Class to the European context

A study by Richard Florida of the creative class in Europe is out: “Europe in the Creative Age [PDF]“. Too bad it does not take into account non-EU members like Switzerland (and Norway). Indexes for the EU members and the US are calculated based on the 3Ts (Talent, Technology and Tolerance) and put all together to create a Creativity Index, Creativy Trend Index (evolution from the past to the future) and a Creativity Matrix (How a country scores on the creativity index and its recent performance or trend).

This study confirms that the epicenter of competitiveness in Europe is shifting from the traditional powers, especially France, Germany and the United Kingdom, to a cluster of Scandinavian, Nordic and northern European counties. The ability to attract the best and the brightest won’t probably be at the United States advange in the future since number of countries in Europe and elsewhere (notably Canada and Australia) have liberalized their immigration policies and increased their efforts to attract and retain talent. But it also lies in the fact that the climate for creative talent in the United States has chilled somewhat both as a result of direct policies which restrict scientific information and make it harder for people to get into and out of the country and also because of a widening perception of the U.S. as unilaterally aggressive and less friendly toward foreign-born people.

A few interesting quotes from this study:

“The possible diagnosis of Europe’s problems ranges from the inflexibility of its labour markets and welfare systems to the quality of its research and innovation, from its rapidly ageing population to the difficulty of applying a single monetary regime to widely diverse countries and regions. But throughout the many-sided debate, few have doubted that the fundamentals
of the US model – its enterprise culture, lightly regulated labour market, competition between states and regions, world class science and technology institutions and openness to migrants – provide the strongest position for competitiveness over the next generation.”

“America’s current political environment may be undermining its competitive advantage, for example by restricting scientific research and making border entry harder: between 2001 and 2002, the number of US visas issued for foreign-born workers in science and technology fell by a staggering 55 per cent.”

“Dynamic knowledge-economies do not beget social cohesion; rather certain kinds of social cohesion can beget dynamic knowledge-economies. The Nordic countries exemplify this combination of an intense, open and innovative enterprise culture with some of the most egalitarian social and civic cultures in the world. In doing so, they point to the crucial role of
public infrastructure and leadership in underpinning the creative economy, and to the kinds of adaptive strategy and smart governance that reformers elsewhere should learn from.”

“The locus of competitiveness is the city-region, not the firm or the nation”

“This report starts from the premise that the economic leaders of the future will not likely be emerging giants like India or China that are becoming global centers for cost effective manufacturing and the delivery of basic business processes. Rather, they will be the nations and regions within nations that can best mobilize the creative capacities of their people and attract creative talent from around the world.”

“It would be extremely interesting and useful to be able to see how London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin and Rome, for example, compare to New York, Chicago, Toronto, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney on the key dimensions of creative performance.”