Creative Economy at ‘Heart of All Economy’
Results of a new study commissioned by the Indiana Arts Commission show 4.3 percent of Hoosier jobs are part of the so-called creative economy, a sector the commission calls "the heart of all economy." The report is the first of its kind for the IAC and designed to serve as a baseline for public and private sector decision makers. Deputy Director Miah Michaelsen tells Inside INdiana Business the report shows a higher proportion of Hoosiers are self-employed in the creative class than the country.
Michaelsen says the report helps illustrate how jobs and industries producing cultural goods, services and intellectual property fit into the Indiana economy. "It helps position the creative economy along with other economic and employment sectors in the state, and that was an important reason to do this review in the first place. Not only, obviously, to benchmark it, but then also to help bring a lot of folks together to look at it and talk about it and, again, to put forth the idea that the creative economy has a lot of jobs associated with it and there’s a lot of economic activity attached to it."
The IAC says it hopes the results can make our state a competitively creative place-of-choice for workers and their employers. In all, the report says nearly 161,000 jobs are connected to the creative economy. The Creative Economy Report was a collaboration among the IAC, Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne Inc., Community Research Institute of IPFW and the Indiana University Public Policy Institute at IUPUI.
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Miah Michaelsen says the report helps illustrate how jobs and industries producing cultural goods, services and intellectual property fit into the Indiana economy.