Convergence culture:Making Irish business people global design leaders might just pay off, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.

Where do you sit in the hierarchy of creative professionals? It could one day soon be as important as salary and home address. This is because we have entered a creative economy. It is in part a new buzz phrase and a new way to sell business books, but over in the UK the idea is taken seriously enough, to the extent that there is now a Centre for Creative Business (CCB) at the London Business School, set up to act as a catalyst and reference point for a fast-growing sector of the economy.

The notion of a creative economy is intriguing, because it tends to use as its model a series of concentric circles with artists at the core. The inference is that investments in art yield dividends across the economy. With more invested in art we get better designers, better film-makers, better TV producers, a more critical intellectual environment, and a more satisfying and challenging visual environment. Said like that it sounds obvious.

Greg Orme, who heads the CCB, says these creative industries typically need more rigorous management skills than they currently have. They also need to find ways to mitigate risk. "The distinguishing feature of a creative industry is that no one knows which TV programme or film will be successful," says Orme. Nonetheless, firms in these areas rely on "attracting talent, remunerating them and incentivising them to be creative".

There are, of course, many creative-industry companies outside the highly vulnerable film or independent TV sectors. They consist of industrial-design departments, advertising agencies, and the graphic arts. Orme's point, I think, is that if you help the core of this sector to prosper, you create confidence in creativity in general - you not only give it stature, you protect and enhance that stature and attract more talent into risky jobs.

The nearest we have to the Centre for Creative Business is Sligo Institute of Technology's Centre for Design Innovation. The centre's director, Toby Scott, says its aim is to make Irish business people global design leaders. By way of comparison, the UK centre is a joint venture between the London Business School (one of the world's leading management centres) and the University of the Arts, a body that brings together the leading London art colleges.

The comparison suggests that Toby Scott is ploughing a lonely furrow. Yet if we are to compete in the future, we presumably need to resource our understanding of creativity, at least on the scale our competitors have chosen to do. Or so you'd imagine.

An explicit creativity policy has been part of British-government thinking for nearly a decade, says Orme. "You can't really dispute that the creative industries are big and growing," he insists. "The creative industries are second only to financial industries in the UK. The service sector is growing, but not as fast as it was."

I'd like to be a sceptic in this debate but personal experience is telling me Orme is right. First of all, there is the very visible engagement of a whole generation of people in creative tasks on the internet. Secondly, there is the growing importance of the visual across nearly every aspect of industry.

A month ago I sat with Chris Bangle, a now legendary designer who has revolutionised car design and overseen work for BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce.

While we talked about the technical features of cars, Bangle brought out a small sketch book. He makes visual notations of everything that he finds interesting, and there on the first page was a drawing of an old carriage. The 19th-century carriage is an object that has inspired Bangle's designs, and its bulging, crafted wheels can be seen in today's BMWs.

Crucially, Bangle had noted in the carriage a design detail that is still troubling modern car designers. If I understood him properly, it was the ability of 19th-century craftsmen to create flowing lines across different segments of a vehicle. They were already liberated from the constraints that Bangle wrestles with.

This struck me as anecdotal support for the idea that the creative economy is real and that it matters.

What Toby Scott wants to do is get more of us thinking like Bangle. At its heart, this means finding ways for business people to liberate the way they think, not just so that they employ more designers and begin to "get" art, but to free them to address problems with an artist's eye, exploring optional versions of how the world around us is unfolding. It could be fun.