Charles  Landry’s 2003 Thinker-in-Residence report, Rethinking Adelaide: Capturing Imagination, was pretty much shelved straight after its release.

Now, 10 years later, the State Government has come full circle. Landry and his Creative City Index are back on the agenda – this time sequestered as part of the Government’s determination to demonstrate this is a creative (and innovative) place.

It continues our Government’s obsession with measuring the intangible, and its inability to embrace creativity beyond using it as a buzzword.

The SA Government has been on a creativity quest for more 10 years now. The mission was formalised in 2004 when the inaugural South Australian Strategic Plan (SASP) identified “Fostering Creativity” as one of its six objectives.

If innovation is about doing things differently, then addressing economic challenges by propping up the car industry can be discounted as innovation because we’ve been doing the same thing over and over.

At that time, Richard Florida was the leading international creativity expert and the SASP set a target for Adelaide to achieve a rank in the top three creative regions nationally (we ranked fifth at the time) in Florida’s Top 10 Regions Creativity Index.

Other 2004 SASP creativity targets included increasing the number of patents filed, growing SA’s feature film industry, increasing business expenditure on research and development, increasing the level of internet use in SA, and hosting the headquarters of more than 40 per cent of major national research centres of excellence and cooperative research centres.

Subsequent iterations of the SASP have continued to include creativity as a key goal.  In the 2007 version, innovation was added to creativity, providing us with two equally elusive objectives for the state to foster, let alone measure.

Although creativity and innovation were combined into the same objective, the targets and their measurement indicators were separated into conventional definitions of creativity as art, and innovation as science and technology.  Such traditional designations are not creative, and certainly not innovative.

Two points from Landry’s 2003 Thinker’s report are worth revisiting. Firstly, that simply having arts and cultural festivals does not necessarily make a place creative.  Secondly, a willingness to take risks is necessary to foster creativity.  This is particularly relevant to SA’s aspiration to be innovative.

The 2007 SASP defined innovation as doing things differently, but innovation is more than that.  It is the development of a creative idea so it may be realised as an actual outcome (such as a process, a product, a system or a service).  This requires individuals, businesses, organisations and governments to stretch and extend themselves and their thinking by taking risks.

They focus on known successes like festivals and the film industry, which contribute to the status-quo rather than extend possibilities

The current version of the SASP is a little more expansive.  It attempts to connect its objectives across areas of priority (community, prosperity, environment, health, education and ideas) to address challenging issues and suggest possibilities for future activity.  But for the fostering creativity and innovation objective, these connections are rudimentary and uninspiring.

The SASP commentary states that South Australians are creative because we innovate to overcome environmental, economic and social challenges.  If innovation is about doing things differently, then addressing economic challenges by propping up the car industry can be discounted as innovation because we’ve been doing the same thing over and over.

The current SASP also identifies (as Landry did in 2003) that SA’s size makes it the perfect place to test social and business innovations.  Clearly not social and business innovations like the Integrated Design Commission, the Thinker-in-Residence program, the Equip design integration program or Zero Waste – all of which have now ended.

The current SASP includes useful suggestions of what individuals, communities and the Government can do to help SA attain its innovation and creativity targets.  The Government’s responsibility is identified as attracting world-leading thinkers and innovators to our state.  Thinkers and innovators like Charles Landry perhaps?

Instead of identifying new methods of fostering previously untapped creative and innovation potential, the SASP repeatedly concentrates on known and familiar sectors

The SASP creativity and innovation objective has never, and does not currently, encourage risk or expanded thinking.  For the past decade, the targets and measures have barely changed.  Based upon limited understanding of what creativity and innovation could really mean for this state, they represent confusion about whether we want a creative capital city or a creative state.  They focus on known successes like festivals and the film industry, which contribute to the status-quo rather than extend possibilities.  They silo creativity and innovation by defining creativity as art, and innovation as science and technology, reinforcing conventional boundaries.

Perhaps their greatest limitation is the repeated identification of inadequate targets and measures for creativity and innovation.  Measures of things that are already quantifiable do not foster the attainment of things we aspire to achieve.

The Fostering Creativity and Innovation objective in the SASP continues to miss opportunity in both the understanding of what creativity and innovation actually is, and how broadly the objective could be applied, measured and evaluated.  Instead of identifying new methods of fostering previously untapped creative and innovation potential, the SASP repeatedly concentrates on known and familiar sectors and events that are already established.  Even the SASP’s own limited definition of innovation – doing things differently – indicates that a new approach to this strategic objective is needed.

Joanne Cys is associate professor in Interior Architecture at the University of South Australia and past national president of the Design Institute of Australia.