Work at school level crucial to developing creative industries

Jorge Barreto Xavier

Professor Jorge Barreto Xavier said that the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) are fields that still have significant opportunities for exploration and development, especially in the education sector.

The professor of Public Policies for Culture and Management of Creative Industries from ISCTE-IUL in Lisbon was in Macau this week to present a seminar on “Creative Industries as a Tool for Development” and a photography exhibition.

“I think it would be important to have, at some level of the education system, some kind of program specifically addressing creativity. I’m talking about [in levels such as] primary school, high school… a better stimulation of creativity for the students,” Xavier said. Such programs would be “the framework to have [at university level] better students and more people interested in creative industries,” according to him.

Xavier noted that there is a second important step of narrowing down creativity to one field.

“You can’t do everything. You have to choose what you want – either it’s design, or tourism […] or even visual arts or cinema,” he noted.

For the final he said,  “you need to have artists and social society working together for that objective.”

Regarding the ability of Macau to engage with and succeed on such a task, the scholar said: “Macau has important [economic] growth. But the secret is to find out how to profit from this opportunity for economic development to invest in the future in order not to be [reduced to] a monothematic economic area.”

“[The idea is not to compete between industries]. It’s an alliance for the future [in which] casinos can batch opportunities together [with CCI].”

Such alliances can occur in different creative fields such as multimedia, visual arts and performing arts. Xavier noted also the CCI are built and developed through “networks that work at a worldwide level.”