Funding profitable collision of culture and business

Culture and business are heading for a profitable collision with the introduction of a seed fund designed to support the creative industries in Northern Ireland. The £3 million sterling (€4.9 million) programme recently launched by the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Mr Michael McGimpsey, will give a major boost to a rapidly growing sector that already generates £600 million a year and employs 15,000.

Incorporating areas as diverse as architecture, film, fashion design and interactive software, creative industries are defined as any innovative and creative activity that has the potential for wealth and job creation through the exploitation of intellectual property.

It is an area that has never been fully tapped into by government in Northern Ireland as for decades the industrial sector loomed large in the economic vision of successive administrations.

With devolution however, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal interest in developing the creative economy of "Cool Britannia", it is now firmly established as part of the programme for government.

"We are dipping our toe into a new area," said Mr Mark Mawhinney, head of the Creativity Unit in the Culture Department, who will be dispensing grants of up to £50,000 to successful applicants over the next three years.

"There is a growing realisation across government that creativity in business has a large role to play in imbedding peace and economic development," he said.

The sector is growing twice as fast as any other in the North, expanding by 75 per cent since 1995. Creative industry represents 3.6 per cent of GDP, just less than in Scotland where massive investment in the sector is planned.

The idea of a specially-designed seed fund was first mooted in Mr McGimpsey's Unlocking Creativity document published last year.

Among the beneficiaries in the pilot funding scheme are creative website designers, film companies and innovative children's e-media projects. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland is receiving help in establishing a Craft Development Centre but established arts organisations and individuals are not the main target of the fund.

"The fund is designed to encourage creativity and innovation in business. We are concerned with projects that cross the boundaries of commerce, education, business and culture. It is the commercialisation of ideas, we would like to see some of the things that are funded producing a return," said Mr Mawhinney.

The fund was not, he insisted, a top-up for Arts Council grants. "It won't be for an artist sitting in a garret as we feel they are fairly well catered for," he said. "It is about finding out whether there is the potential for Northern Ireland to occupy niches in the creative industries market, be that multi-media animation or education programmes. We want to get organisations to the point where they can make their ideas work and attract the interest of serious investors."

The Arista Development Centre, based in Belfast, is one new company that has been supported by the fund through the Northern Ireland Film Commission. The firm offers a specialist service to participants in the film industry, facilitating the development of scripts and creating an online international database of talent.

Mr Stephen Cleary of Arista explained the importance of the seed fund. "Without this funding it would have certainly taken us longer to set up in Belfast," he said.

"It has done exactly what a seed fund should do which is that it intervenes at the right moment and makes a project happen," he said.

According to Mr John McClellan of the government enterprise agency LEDU, this new approach to creative industries will succeed in introducing companies to markets that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Research being undertaken at Queen's University and due for release at the end of this month will provide a detailed assessment of the potential of the estimated 2,000 companies across Northern Ireland which fall under the creative industry banner.

"The research will give department representatives like myself the ability to say there are very definite opportunites here and thus take the sector more seriously than we might have done in the past," he said.

Application packs for the seed fund, with guidelines and application forms, are available from the Creativity Unit, Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, 3rd Floor, Interpoint, 20-24 York Street, Belfast BT15 1AQ. Phone: Belfast 90 25 89 49