Mr. Renner, you have been a punk musician, journalist, chief executive of Universal Music Deutschland and today manage the motor.de music portal. At which point in your life were you most creative?
I wouldn’t have been able to master any of the different stations in my life without creativity. But I was certainly furthest away from creativity as head of a corporation.
Do the structures in a large business corporation obstruct creativity? Does creativity only thrive in small groups?
Creativity often conflicts with control of large complex systems. Both only rarely fit together. In the course of a successful business career you inevitably become detached from the creative complex and have to increasingly occupy yourself with purely economic matters. It is practically impossible to be creative and a great business executive at the same time.
US economist Richard Florida has announced The Rise of the Creative Class. Will artists, musicians and other creative individuals replace managers in the future?
The creative class is made up of the people who find out how you make something or how to make something that already exists even better. They drive growth more than anyone else, especially in the Western industrialized nations. They also represent their future, because the industrialized countries are hardly likely to survive in a globalized world with their current unit wage costs. Manufacturing industry can simply produce goods at more favourable prices in the newly industrialized countries. Western industrialized countries must capitalize on their education and that is only possible through new ideas and innovations. I’m convinced that the creative economy today already predefines much of what will affect the situation of all employees. The creative economy centres on communication, it sets social trends, uses the latest technologies, such as digitalization, and is highly mobile. That makes economic sense and at the same time is also cool. That’s why I would agree with Florida. Economic value creation is increasingly attributable to those who make up the “creative class”.
Nevertheless, most businesses tend to look for engineers or scientists. Humanities specialists or artists often have considerable difficulty finding a job.
Florida also counts engineers and scientists as members of the creative class. The most important thing about applicants is their suitability for new challenges. People are sought who are in a position to create value for businesses in the form of new ideas. It doesn’t matter whether they are engineers who have to define a new form of mobility for car companies or whether they are humanities graduates who take magazines into a modern Internet economy. The pressure is steadily increasing, however, on unskilled or low-skilled jobs in traditional industries. These are precisely the employment sectors in which people find themselves competing with the newly industrialized countries. And these are the industrial sectors that can’t profit sufficiently from digitalization.
How would you rank the German creative class in international terms?
When it comes to standards of training and the ideas that originate from Germany, there is absolutely no doubt about its ability to compete. German scholarship and culture are well-placed internationally. The domestic creative economy has reached a size larger than that of the car industry. Its problem is people’s perception inside Germany. Germans think that a project or plan must hold water. An idea alone will not gain recognition. That has advantages, because it encourages people to realize their ideas, but, of course, it also leads to the frequent underrating of the creative economy’s contribution to overall economic growth. On average, a creative business has 3.2 employees. A sector that is divided into so many small units naturally finds it difficult to lobby effectively.
Florida says that towns and regions are only economically successful if large numbers of people from the creative class live in them. Where is Germany most creative?
There are two kinds of creative centres in Germany. On the one hand, there are metropolitan regions like Hamburg and Munich, where there is already a high level of saturation, but also a high level of professionalism. On the other hand, there is Berlin, where Germany realizes Florida’s three Ts – tolerance, technology and talent – in the most exemplary way. The city is extremely open, free and fast-moving. Berlin constantly re-invents itself. It is highly intense and perfect for all inquisitive creative individuals.
What potential does the creative economy have?
The ideas produced in Germany attain considerable international significance. For a long time, this role was played by the Anglo-American creative economy. This monopoly position is still distinctly felt in the film and pop markets – in part, also in literature. However, changes are now taking place here, thanks to the Internet. It is dissolving the old distribution boundaries. A German or French musician used only to be able to achieve excellent artistic and economic results in their respective countries. These national boundaries are fading away in the global digitalized market. Suddenly Tokio Hotel can win the MTV Newcomer Award in America and Rammstein rock the Fuji Festival near Tokyo. Internet distribution provides access to a global market that can rapidly be served from all artistic niches. The interplay of digitalization and globalization offers an enormous opportunity, not only for the music sector.
On that basis, creative industries like the music industry should be doing incredibly well. But it’s in crisis. Are creativity and successful management mutually exclusive?
I don’t believe that’s the case. This is simply due to the fact that anyone who produces a product that’s easy to digitalize will eventually be affected by market changes. This includes the music business. Its product has a low data volume, a good compression technology exists in the form of the MP3 data format developed in Germany, attractive retail products like the ipod are popular fashion items and there is an inquisitive, technology-friendly market – in the shape of young people worldwide. It should therefore come as no surprise that today music is often illegally copied and passed on. Nevertheless, the industry has responded and now makes a lot of money with concerts, merchandising and downloads. If it were to respond more strongly to customers’ needs and introduce flat rates for unlimited downloads, the industry would do much better. I would turn your idea on its head. If you run the creative economy according to the optimizing rationale of conventional industry, it will go awry. In this sector you can’t think according to the rhythm of the stock market. Creative personnel can’t be optimized just like that.
But doesn’t digitalization also hinder creativity? The Internet produces enormous amounts of useless data and large numbers of people present themselves on the Web as part of the creative class, although in reality it’s not the case at all.
When everyone can express themselves, much of what is said is bound to be superfluous. That’s in the very nature of all open systems. That’s why the Internet urgently needs presentation. That’s why there are journalists and editorial interfaces to separate the wheat from the chaff. Selectors are incredibly important. There are good reasons for the boom in Internet social networks in which users can learn from one another. They use the selections made by someone they respect for their own purposes.
You were and still are a selector of this kind. Again and again you have discovered bands like Rammstein or Element of Crime with some of the most successful German musicians. Does that involve creative work or simply a keen sense for what is the right product at the right time?
On one hand, you need to understand which product on the market is relevant. On the other, you have to think creatively. No product and no creative partner – for example, a band – is ideal from the very start. In the case of Element of Crime, it took five years before they finally sang in German. It is generally true that creativity cannot be learnt, but you can learn to use available creativity better. You must enjoy developing ideas. Otherwise success in a creative job is impossible. Excellence can only be achieved by those who fully identify with what they are doing.
