The Research Centre

In 1989 I went for a drink with Bob Palmer, the Canadian Director of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture. We were talking about how we might develop cheap and effective events that would have tangible lasting benefits for Glasgow beyond 1990s’ year-long festival. Bob told me that the cheapest and most effective programme he’d ever come across had been hosted by the city of Los Angeles in the late eighties. It simply consisted of a series of meals attended by a constantly changing retinue of diners who had never before clapped eyes on each other.

Over the hour or two spent eating, strangers got to know each other and many developed relationships and businesses with people who’s beliefs and values and visions they shared. Just as cities grow where people meet – at the intersections of roads and around ports, if you bring people together things happen, even businesses happen. Why would we form ‘companies’ if not to enjoy the company of like-minded people?

Lloyd’s of London started life in just this way. It was originally the kind of coffee house that grew up around London’s coaching stations. It’s rules celebrated the sociable atmosphere found in most urban places and for the price of a mug of coffee a person earned the right to speak in Lloyd’s room.

People used coffee houses for more than idle chat. Gathering around a cup of coffee provided the perfect excuse for people of different social rank to get together and exchange information on important subjects such as how busy the roads were or who was trading well or who was inventing a new way of doing or making something. Modern newspapers appeared on the scene and were made available behind the bar, further fuelling the conversation by providing new topics for discussion and news from further afield.

Lloyd’s spawned coffee houses all around London. The model was copied in France before the revolution where it acted as a cover for political groups who hung out around the Palais-Royale. After the Revolution the cafés became banks and banks, once more, have become coffee houses, and bars and restaurants. And I feel sure that many of these new places, if they’re of a high enough quality and designed to be sociable places, will in turn incubate new ‘companies’.

My point is that there’s nothing difficult or special about creativity because human beings are biologically predisposed to create. It’s what makes us different from animals. Our urge to reinvent the wheel and continually create more and better things is our greatest natural asset. So we must be doing something very wrong if we’re failing to capitalise on the most common resource on the face of the planet. I suppose we’re actually gathered here tonight to work out how we manage to stop ourselves from being creative, and that’s a very interesting and very ‘Scottish’ subject.

My own business, Graven Images, grew out of the social and educational environment at The Glasgow School of Art, the Vic Café and the Griffin. There we learned how creative people in Europe and North America configured their lives to be creatively innovative. We knew that we didn’t want boring jobs in boring companies. So it seemed reasonable that we should apply what we’d learned at art school to our own lives and do something interesting instead. We reckoned that was the purpose of education.

Sadly, at that time we were the only students to set up a company instead of going on yet another industrial placement. It wasn’t surprising because, in a way, the School would have been happier if we’d graduated with no jobs, they viewed our actions as precociously insolent. But we weren’t trying to be heroes, we simply didn’t know any better, we’d nothing to lose and we thought Glasgow was a good a place for a design business. So Graven Images was born, based on a model of a European cross-disciplinary design studio, even if it was in a somewhat colder climate.

Thankfully, one organisation believed in us: The Scottish Co-operative Development Committee. They helped us apply for Regional Development Grants, Enterprise Initiative cash and persuaded the City Council to give us a one-off grant of a thousand pounds just because we were a co-operative. In 1986 that gave us £38.40 a week to live on which was roughly the same as a student grant. It wasn’t much but it was enough.

Along the way, so-called business consultants with no actual experience of being in business gave us strange advice. We were told to get a safe job with a future (as if such a thing exists); to get a track record; not to be so damn sure; not to go into business with close friends, lovers or family members; we were told to wear suits and to aspire to be as good as people from London. The high street banks wouldn’t lend us cash and the government agencies wouldn’t give us soft loans, relevant advice or work. But we persevered and learned and changed lots of things along the way, including our co-operative constitution.

It’s a fact of life that institutions and investors are nervous of supporting new creative industries because they don’t look like traditional ones. New creative businesses look different and operate in different ways from traditional models so it’s difficult to find one support strategy that fits all, therefore investors prefer to give low risk project-based funding rather than core funding, a practise strikingly similar to usury.

We can’t really compare new creative industries to the monolithic business of shipbuilding but both are innovative and internationally influential. New creative industries don’t directly employ thousands but they are electronically linked to millions. There are more new creative industries than there ever were shipbuilders, but they’re smaller and lighter and more manoeuvrable than the ocean-going ships. They’re essential components in many global industries as well as being industries in themselves and, unlike shipbuilders, they don’t need to re-tool; they just upgrade software or quickly change direction. Like shipbuilders, they employ people with lots different skills. We employ graphic and interior designers and architects. We all use the same tools: the same hardware and software to collaborate with each other and with writers, musicians, filmmakers, engineers and technologists on projects ranging from two and three-dimensional corporate branding, graphic and interior design for retail and leisure industries to international travelling exhibitions.

Technological convergence and cross-disciplinary convergence of skill focussed around language and software are daily realities of working life. But while being able to discuss music and metallurgy on the Macintosh eases communication it’s not a substitute for knowledge. Innovative companies need research and development and the most pleasant way of uncovering new possibilities is through forming relationships with the many educational institutions on our doorstep. And while we’re on the subject I believe we should educate the marketplace as well as the workforce.

Scotland has an unrivalled tradition of education and innovation that gives us a global marketing advantage. We are expected to be inventive.

Contemporary Scotland has emerged as a mature, intelligent and idiosyncratic mongrel society. Cross-cultural influences and tendency towards the exotic puts us in a good position to express our rich differences through products and services – to make them distinctive and desirable in a global marketplace. We should bask in our Scottishness and create an environment where creativity is embedded in everything we do, where the risk that has traditionally accompanied us throughout history is once more regarded as an essential part of creative life. The more eggs you break the more omelettes you make.

We should stop trying to be American or Catalonian or from London. Ironically, it’s often harder for me to win work in Scotland than it is to win work in England and abroad. Big Scottish institutions are seduced by the apparent glamour and security of working with a London creative team therefore Scottish companies, like mine, don’t get the chance to do their best work at home. I learned long ago that no one ever got sacked for commissioning mediocre work and I think its high time they did.

We must lead by example and invest in creativity. Financially, Scotland’s a poor country. I therefore wholeheartedly approve of any positive discrimination that funds creative solutions, because they don’t cost more but they do take more effort. Effort doesn’t cost more money. It’s easy to get creative people to do their best work but first they must be given a chance.

In 1950 Hugh MacDiarmid spoke about the Arts in Scotland. I’ve taken a bit of his speech, published by Mainstream in 1984, and substituted ‘arts’ with ‘creativity’. It reads:

“The mass of the people will react all right if they get the chance. It is the stupid conservatism of their self-styled betters’ that’s the danger… Amateurism has always been the curse of the creativity in Scotland – amateurism and the inveterate predilection to ‘domesticate the issue’… the progress of creativity in Scotland is dependent upon… wider appreciation and striving after the highest possible standard”.

The biggest challenge we face in Scotland is to allow ourselves to be creative. We have to allow creativity to happen, learn to recognise it and support it, and we can’t innovate slowly, so I suggest we all go up the pub for a discussion and sign some cheques. Then we’ll run a slate and see how many of us have backed a winner.