Building a creative economy using the Long Tail

Based on the previous entry of applying the Long Tail to building a creative economy, here’s a video illustrating how it could work…

Phase I. To grow a creative economy and culture, establish a service to link creatives with companies needing creative talent, whether as employees or vendors. This is the ‘big head’.

Phase II. Develop a website to capture the Long Tail, that is, the 95% of the creatives that don’t have connections to the companies and organizations that can hire them, but have more than enough to talent. Where growth occurs is when companies that don’t realize they need creative talent meet up with creative talent that doesn’t realize their talent is needed.

Phase III. This placemaking-oriented phase will be to use the creative community to grow a much larger progressive community of future customers to crowdsource (apply the Wikipedia approach to) the building of meaningful places, like green outdoor cafe districts, shared workplaces and attainably-priced condos.

However, to legitimize the second phase, you need to prove the first phase is financially sustainable. Thus, ensure that someone links the economic producers – defined here as large companies/organizations and smaller creative businesses – in order to match them up with creative talent, whether to fulfill job positions or complete creative projects (ie websites, events, social media campaign) to attract new customer bases.

It looks like Arlington, Virginia may be the first to formally implement this program. Stay tuned!

Would you support such a program in your city?

About The Author

neilkt