Liverpool gets creative with new commission
LIVERPOOL’S Creativity and Innovation Commission, led by Mersey TV founder Prof Phil Redmond, meets for the first time today.
It was set up by the city’s mayor Joe Anderson to review how the city can maximise its creative potential.
Around 12,000 people in Merseyside are employed in roles ranging from the media, publishing and ICT through to architecture, design and the performing arts.
According to the mayor’s office, the commission will look at how creativity can be “stimulated, nurtured and fostered within schools and communities” and how innovation can be promoted to support business.
Mayor Anderson said: “Liverpool is one of the great cities of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism and encouraging innovation and building enterprise is the most effective way to realise individual promise and spur the economy.
“Being creative and innovative has always been the instinctive response in Liverpool to harder times and in this current climate we must devise ways to help liberate the potential that exists in Liverpool and embed those behaviours that will help sustain the city and attract more investment and business.”
Prof Redmond said: “We have a wide ranging brief with the goal of finding the best ways to maintain and grow Liverpool’s reputation as an international capital for creativity, culture and commerce. We will be considering how innovation and business or entrepreneurial acumen can be engendered, stimulated and supported to help grow more business opportunities across sectors of the economy and across public, private and third sector activity.”
The commission includes: Dr Denise Barrett Baxendale, chief executive, Everton in the Community; Stuart Cosgrove, director of creative diversity, Channel 4; Dr David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool; Alastair Machray, editor-in-chief, Trinity Mirror Merseyside, Cheshire, North Wales; Claire McColgan, director of Culture Liverpool; Aideen McGinley, BBC Trust member; Sir Ken Robinson, expert on creativity and innovation; Peter Salmon, director England, BBC.
