Culture, Services, Knowledge or "Is content King, or are we just drama Queens?"

The paper tracks the fate of content as it passes across three grids of understanding: across the grid of ‘culture’, of ‘services’, and of ‘knowledge’. These grids also serve as historical and/or possible rationales for state intervention in the creative ndustries, as well as industry’s own understandings of their nature and role. While there was a cultural industries and policy ‘heyday’ around the 1980s and 1990s, as the domain of culture expanded, cultural policy fundamentals are being squeezed by a combined effects of the 'big three' - convergence, globalisation and digitisation – which are underpinning a services industries model of industry development and regulation. This model, despite dangers, carries advantages in that it can mainstream the creative industries as economic actors and lead to possible rejuvenation of hitherto marginalised types of content production. But new developments around the knowledge -based economy point to the limitations for wealth creation of only micro-economic efficiency gains and liberalisation strategies, the classic services industries strategies. Recognising that such strategies won’t get push up the value chain to innovation and knowledge -based industries , governments are now accepting a renewed interventionary role for the state in setting twenty-first century industry policies. But the content (and, as sub-sector of them, the creative) industries don’t as a rule figure in R&D and innovation strategies. The task is, first, to establish that the content industries indeed engage in what would be recognisable as R&D and exhibit value chains that integrate R&D into them. Second, to evaluate whether the state has an appropriate role to support such R&D in the same way and for the same reasons as it supports science and technology R&D