An increasingly important part of the creative economy lies in industries who not only use creativity as a significant input, but whose entire value proposition is based on their ability to incessantly develop entirely new concepts. While this is becoming true for ever-larger parts of our economies, these so-called "creative industries" rely on a combination and recombination of art and technical knowledge which require distinct periods of articulation and rearticulation.

A professor of strategy and innovation at Cass Business School, Joseph Lampel has given much though to these industries and the way they develop onwards. A central piece of the developmental model of creative industries, he says, are field configuring events, or FCEs. These events occur when actors from within an industry assemble in a location for a limited time, during which the unstructured face-to-face interactions occurring during or between ceremonial activities provide an opportunity for collective sense-making.

In such ephemeral spaces, two things happen. On one hand, cognitive perspectives come together in rapid succession. FCEs like the Berlin Film Festival, the Venice Biennale or the Paris Fashion Week facilitate the fast exposition of several marginally different pieces. Such repetition constitutes a shared cognitive baggage from which key items can be identified as iconic of the disciplinary zeitgeist.

More importantly, the second thing to happen is grounded in the social dimension. Beyond artifacts, field evolution is driven by a series of interpersonal iterations, which begin with agglomeration and sporadic interaction, driving the reorganization of collaborative / competitive networks and leading to an increased awareness of identity of all participants in the said creative field. "The Internet has made FCEs more important than ever", he continues, reinforcing the necessity of presential meetings. "FCEs maintain continuity in the midst of discontinuity".

In purely economic terms, the primary advantages of FCEs are that they serve as self-referrential spaces where value may be determined. Much like the true markets of the past, the co-presence of several artifacts that are comparable in identity and scope allows to avoid the contestability of creative products and to "organize the joint valuation of creative products and resources", says Lampel.

As playgrounds serving the definition of value, as well as the identification of cognitive and social determinants, FCEs are purposeful in the advancement of the creative economies. Moreover, their geographic localization may not be neutral in the constitution of the configurational aspect of their contributions. Hence, "cities of festivals" like Montreal or Barcelona – or Berlin, Paris and London – become known for being the locus of creation and innovation. Where the "truth", in a way, emerges from the myriads of interactions.

This text is part of a series written in the context of the Fifth edition of the Montreal-Barcelona Summer School on Management of Creativity, organized by Mosaic HEC Montréal and Universitat Barcelona, July 9 to 24, 2013.
Illustration by Studio 923a. Read all posts in the series at blog.fandco.ca/yulbcn.