So Where's This on Our Creativity Scale?

This:

And this

and a bunch of Gangnam's, including flash mob versions

Plus Psy on the Process:

And a political version:

Overview of the Creative Class

Here is a link to the best single summary of Richard Florida's work on the creative class, its relation to college, and its importance to economic and social development.

On measuring the inputs of skill and creativity to the economy, Florida writes:

The debate is over how to measure human capital. Most economists operationalize this as education level. The creative class measure is an alternative measure of skill that operationalizes skill by occupation, using the occupational codes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I discuss my reasoning for this in numerous places including The Rise of the Creative Class and Flight of the Creative Class, in my response to Ed Glaeser’s review of Rise, and my essay “Revenge of the Squelchers” in Next American City.  The basic reasoning is that occupation captures not what people study but what they actually do . . . [emphasis added]

In the extract of his letter to a critic (toward the bottom of the page), Florida identifies three kinds of "human capital" skills.

The first is one we are all familiar with—basic physical skill of the sort associated with traditional work. Its attributes include good hand-to-eye coordination, strength, and dexterity.  

The second two types of skills are those associated with Creative Class work. This second basic skill type—cognitive skill—is reasonably well understood. It involves the ability to acquire knowledge, process information, and solve problems. This basic intellectual and analytical horsepower has been identified as the core skill underpinning the knowledge economy by writers from Peter Drucker and Daniel Bell to Robert Reich and Charles Murray. 

However, there is a third type of skill set that is even more critical. The O*NET data defines its core attributes as the “capacities used to work with people to achieve goals.” You can call it “social intelligence.” Its salient characteristics are discernment, communications abilities, leadership, awareness, and the like. Highly developed social skills include the capacity to bring the right people together on a project, persuasion, social perceptiveness, the ability to help develop other people, and a developed sense of empathy. These are the leadership skills that are needed to innovate, mobilize resources, build effective organizations, and launch new firms.

The humanities disciplines are central to forming the third type of skill and to linking the second and third types.

It's also worth pointing out that STEM fields comprise about 6% of the total U.S. workforce, while "creative class" jobs are at least one-third of the workforce. The gap of say 25% of the workforce consists of non-scientific creative jobs--in other words your future sectors, which aren't as small as they look.

The Question of What You Need to Know to Write Your Paper

Here are a couple of examples:

For the groups doing film adaptations of classic literature, and particularly for the folks interested in marketing and/or entertainment writing, here's a piece in The New York Times about a social networking marketer called Oliver Luckett (in the middle at left) and his new company theAudience (no space) that builds online fan bases.  The descriptions of (1) the state of the film industry and (2) the business interest behind it don't appear until paragraphs 9 and 10. They are interesting for both content and also for the fact that the author buried them later on, once the celebrity story about the celebrity marketer has gotten off the ground.

And here's a piece from the summer about a guy in Oklahoma who pumps out "reviews" of books on sites like Amazon.  Same idea.  Both of these are in the category of "need to know about shift to social networking to write about contemporary culture industries."

David and Adam are working on non-commercial or bottom-up-commercial alternatives to the current music industry. There are some comments about this in the piece about theAudience.  The issue also comes up around college textbooks.  See this blog post by a prominent blogger on "open source" issues for a good overview of types of non-commercial licensing, and some comments about "predation" vs. "production" models of creative output in the current economy.