organizational innovation and new value-added models, which favour new
entrants, and less on traditional scale advantages and large start-up investments.
… [U]ser created content has become a signi! cant force for how content is created
and consumed and for traditional content suppliers. (OECD 2007a: 5)
The creative industries approach harnesses these ideas to a broad research
agenda that examines the disintegration of media work from the con! nes of
the towering hierarchies of media conglomerates and stresses the need for midand
micro-range studies of media organizations, media work, the participatory
web, and other forms of creative expression that have been enabled by the
open innovation ecology (Born 2004; Caldwell 2008; Flew 2007, Chapter 3 in
this book; Holt and Perren 2009; Pratt and Jeffcutt 2009). These studies also recast an enduring debate in a new light over whether the creation of cultural
goods is best viewed as dominated by global media conglomerates or as a mix
of large and small ! rms that depend on specialized markets, " exible networks
of production, unique skills, and social relationships. In several studies in the
1980s and 1990s, Susan Christopherson and Michael Storper (1989) developed
and applied an early version of the latter view to an analysis of the ! lm industry.
However, in a manner highly relevant to debates today, Asu Aksoy and Kevin
Robins (1992) criticized their approach as follows: “Their interest is almost
exclusively in examining changes in the ! lm production process, and they fail
to address the key areas of ! lm distribution, exhibition and ! nance ” (Aksoy
and Robins 1992: 7, italics added). Variations on this debate continue to be
replayed but mainly between creative industries and monopoly capitalism
school scholars (e.g. Flew 2007; Miller, Govil, McMurria, Wang, and Maxwell
2005; Moran and Keane 2006; Tinic 2005; see Chapters 3, 4, and 5 in this
book).