Professor Rod Wissler, Executive Dean: I think what is powerful about the creative industries construct, the idea of the creative industries is that it brings together creativity with technology with business.

The critical thing that we do is we feed the creative industries sector of the economy and we do that through the graduates who emerge from this faculty into all those disparate disciplines that we teach in, and we do it through the research we undertake.

We’ve got a broad spectrum of research activity, I mean we cover everything from media and cultural policy which of course is an enormous strength in the Faculty through the Centre of Excellence that we’ve been home to for a number of years.

We’ve got another side of the work that is more to do with innovative content creation. That’s what we refer to as the practice-led research activity in the arts, media, film and television areas and so on.

What really makes this faculty unique in Australia and one of very few in the world is that combination of very high level undergraduate teaching which is producing the next generation of practitioners alongside that very advanced research work which is looking for new issues, new problems and new ways of making creative content.

With the emergence of our professional doctorate in creative industries where what we’re looking for is existing professionals to join us to do an investigative practice, but one which is going to generate ultimately new content and innovative content and which is now accepted by the national research assessment exercise as being absolutely on a par with producers of scholarly journal articles.

I think what we’re going through is a kind of interesting evolution. So it’s not as though we’ve got a conceptual understanding of Creative Industries that is set and it must never change, I think we’ve got to be continually reinventing our own understanding of that conceptual framework so that we are speaking broadly across Australian society of the value of the activities that we undertake”.