Secret to future growth: be creative

[27 January 2006 - Richard Florida - The Financial Express] As the world’s elite gathers for the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, the focus is on harnessing creativity to make nations and businesses more competitive. That sweeping question tends to produce narrowly tech-centric discussions. One favorite approach is to project the raw numbers of science and engineering grads into the future, highlighting the rapid rise of India and China. The issue, then, becomes how to keep up. That’s true, as far as it goes. But the economic advantage of the US, in particular, derives from much more than technical prowess. The real key is the rise of its creative economy, in which growth comes as much from entrepreneurship and entertainment as from engineering. More