Richmond, home to a CEOs for Cities cluster, has launched what organizers hope will be an emergent brand based on creativity.  Led by RVA Creates, a collaborative effort among Venture Richmond, the City, universities, businesses, and over 100 other stakeholders, the message positions Richmond as an “open source experiment in…

According to consumer trends firm trendwatching.com, urban dwellers are posed to become the largest global consumers. These “citysumers” are  “the hundreds of millions (and growing!) of experienced and sophisticated urbanites…, who are ever more demanding, more open-minded, but also more proud, more connected, more spontaneous and more try-out-prone, eagerly…

If your entrepreneurs and creative communities are looking for alternative funding models, here’s a site that offers itself as a platform for funding new endeavors for artists, designers, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, inventors, explorers and more.

Kickstarter taps into ideas of crowdsourcing as a means of funding “creativity…

Memphis College of Art President Jeff Nesin responded to Joe Cortright's view that the arts product and marketing need a major overhaul, given the fact that arts participation is declining.

"Why marketing or product?  Maybe there's a shift, perhaps technological, perhaps cultural, probably both, that we need to acknowledge.  I…

What is bad news for the arts can also be bad news for cities.

Arts Participation 2008: Highlights from a National Survey features top findings from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, conducted by the NEA in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau.  And the findings are…

Here’s a unique approach to putting a place ‘on the map’.  This job advertisement is transformed into a campaign, sure to grab attention, that highlights the distinctive qualities of a place and taps the power of new media for tourism promotion. 

‘The Best Job in…

Good column today in the NYT on Innovation is relevant to our upcoming meeting of the CEOs for Cities Creative City Network.  Some thoughts:

++ Five core values are needed to entrench innovation in the corporate mind-set:  questioning, risk-taking, openness, patience and trust.  All five must be used together. 

“That word creativity is a slippery thing,” according to John Howkins, author of The Creative Economy.  I agree, and that’s one reason it was such an extraordinary opportunity for me to moderate a conversation this afternoon at the Detroit Creative Cities Summit with John, Charles Landry, author…

Some quick lines from today's conversations...

"Creativity is the only inextinguishable resource we have."

There are 3 principles of the creative ecology from John Howkins: 

1.  Everyone is creative.
2.  Creativity needs freedom.
3.  Freedom needs markets.

Creativity does not equal the arts. Creativity is not the same as innovation.

Google obviously sees great potential in new tools that enable people to get involved in producing their own creative content and to recombine content in new ways, as their latest $15 million investment suggests.

Google have purchased a California-based startup, launched by three young Australians, focused on making…