At the end of WWII, John Maynard Keynes famously proposed that the best way to get the UK economy moving at full speed would be to ask the Americans to bomb factories in the UK “at an hour when the directors were sitting there and no one else.” He added: “How else are we to regain the exuberant inexperience which is necessary, it seems, for success.” I’m pretty sure Keynes was kidding, but his point remains strong, particularly at a time when the UK faces a major productivity crisis.
The creative industry is valued at £84.1 billion annually, which equates to 9.6 million pounds per hour. The ONS published a report recently stating that creative enterprises are growing faster than most other UK enterprises. Despite this hypergrowth, there still seems to be a lack of appetite for big money to invest in something one can’t see or touch. Intellectual Property (IP) always seems riskier to larger key investors than, say, road infrastructure or a smart speaker.
Deep-pocketed smart money still has an odd idea of what constitutes risk and an even odder idea of what constitutes investment. That’s startling when you think about the amount of bizarre financial (non-tangible) products that have turned out to be “betting” on expected outcomes rather than anything one could ascribe tangible value to.
The good news is, there does seem to be a growing desire to get to grips with how organisations can adapt to a world where intellectual property—and not just physical collateral—is a chief asset. Of the IP rights, for example, copyright is the linchpin of the film-making industry. Last year’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was a joint production between the UK’s Film4 and Fox Searchlight. Made for something around $15m, it has so far grossed more than $110m worldwide.
Safe to say, there is a job to be done to shift perception around the value of IP in our creative industry.
