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Cultural industries have seen tremendous growth in recent years as a source of revenue and employment. This growth has sparked an interest among policymakers and researchers about what constitutes cultural industries, and the socio-spatial dynamics that underpin the innovation process within such industries. In this chapter, we follow Allen J. Scott in defining cultural industries as activities that produce goods and services valued for their symbolic and aesthetic qualities relative to their utilitarian ones, and we examine the nature of innovation within these industries, given the significance of aesthetic content as a distinguishing feature. In particular, we focus on the need for symbolic knowledge – that is, the knowledge of contemporary cultural currents – as a unique element of the innovation process, and we explore the bases and challenges for the production of such knowledge. In exploring the production of symbolic knowledge, we review some of the established literature that cites the innovation process as an inherently collective one, but we also identify elements that have been, to date, under-examined in the literature in order to broaden out current analyses of the social foundations of innovation. At the same time, our chapter considers some of the key challenges that firms and workers in these industries face, particularly in light of recent structural and technological changes, and the delicate balance between aesthetic and commercial considerations that must be attained. We highlight initiatives that can help to foster more conducive settings for innovation, with particularly emphasis on forms of support and spaces that can shelter cultural workers from risk, mediating rising commercial and technological pressures and fostering experimentation and exchange.

The Cirque du Soleil serves as a model of innovation in the Canadian context. Since the 1980s, it has grown into a global corporation, sourcing talent and staging productions around the world. In this paper, we argue that the firm’s success owes a lot to its unique creation process, and to its ability to maintain a delicate balance between art and commerce. In recent years, however, the Cirque has struggled to maintain this balance, often opting for a formulaic and rigid approach that entails closed, rather than open, spaces of creation. Corporate expansion and the need to deliver shareholder value has led to an increasingly top-down and bureaucratic structure. We examine how corporatization is tied to a standardization and deskilling of labour, examining the ways in which individual creativity is devalued in this new context. We argue that the reorganization has led to a rationalization of the workforce and diminished opportunities for skill development and tacit knowledge exchange. As a consequences of these shifts, an increasing number of workers leave the company to pursue their artistic ambitions elsewhere. [editor summary]

This article explores the process of knowledge production and creativity in the circus. In particular, it examines how the Cirque du Soleil has been able to forge an innovative and novel tradition of circus arts by drawing upon knowledge and competencies from the related fields of sport, circus, dance, and theater. Using the notion of translation developed in actor network theory, we trace how a variety of actors and entities, including both human and nonhuman actants, are enrolled in the creation of a contemporary circus performance. We explore how power and agency are distributed in the networks that foster creativity in the circus, highlighting their inherently unstable and precarious nature, and how the Cirque has created an open and unbounded space that accommodates fluid exchanges between actants (what we call a translation zone).