By KIM GORDON (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-11-08 07:12

Creativity is the lifeblood of all industries. It is the key to future sales and securing competitive advantage. And for the cultural industries and especially broadcasting it is a routine necessity.

Every day, hours of new programming are required, and every year dozens of completely new shows are needed.

So how has the Chinese broadcasting industry, the third largest in the world by advertising income, dealt with its creative challenge?

It's a question of interest to many foreign broadcasters as they ponder how to take advantage of the growth of China's huge media market. To some foreign broadcasters, the Chinese broadcasting industry has many creative and content weaknesses and is over reliant on program ideas that originated in the West.

This mirrors a broader skepticism among some Western commentators about the ability of many of China's larger State-owned enterprises to develop their own high quality innovations in technology or design, which are so essential to the high value-added knowledge based industries of the new century.

The complexity of managing fast-moving technological change, constantly changing consumer habits and ever-increasing competition is something many of the larger broadcasters in China have had to face for years now and in recent years the thorny issue of how to boost their own content innovation has become more urgent.

And this has led to a range of initiatives - first, at the basic level of staff development.

The need to build and liberate the creative potential of staff has led several of China's largest broadcasters to undertake a major training program. This may well be a first in the State sector.

With some foresight, Chinese broadcasters like Shanghai Media Group (SMG), the second largest broadcaster in China, and Hunan Broadcasting System, one of the most focused on entertainment shows, decided a few years ago to send senior executives and producers to the UK for intensive training in creativity and innovation.

This significant investment was partly motivated by intensifying internal competition and a looming creativity crisis in the form of a shortage of popular high quality programming.

Why the UK? The UK is a creative powerhouse in the world of television formats and punches well above its weight. It is the leading producer of TV formats in the world, grabbing nearly half of the world market last year, while the US television industry, which is five times bigger, took just over 10 percent. The UK success may hold many lessons for both commercial and non-commercial broadcasters in how to enhance their creative skills.

So how do Chinese "creatives" compare with Western ones?

Over the past two years, teams of SMG creatives had their creative mettle tested while in the UK. They had to use their knowledge of their viewers to come up with original program concepts and formats for the Chinese market under tight time pressure, in unfamiliar surroundings and under the watchful and critical gaze of top UK creatives.

The toughest challenge was having to present new ideas to a panel of top UK television executives, including one of the most insightful and straight-talking TV executives in the UK industry.

Claudia Rosencrantz is a legend in the world of entertainment television. It was she who had the foresight to commission for the UK's most popular channel two of the most successful television programs in history: Pop Idol and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The franchise for Who Wants to be a Millionaire? alone sold last year for more than $200 million and Pop Idol has spawned talent shows across the globe.

Every year SMG producers have had to brave this gauntlet. Last year the first idea pitched to Rosencrantz was one of the worst she had heard - and she pulled no punches in her criticism, but another idea presented to her was good enough for her to consider commissioning it herself.

This year, the ideas crop was better. One program idea was commended by Rosencrantz as "brilliant" and some others were said to be "world class ideas". A senior executive from the world's largest independent television production company agreed that all of this year's ideas had universal themes and were good enough to be on TV anywhere.

From my five years of experience running these programs for SMG, Hunan Broadcasting and Beijing TV, I can see that China's large broadcasting enterprises have no shortage of highly creative talent. And like creatives from Western broadcasters, they are quite capable of significantly upping the output and quality of their program ideas with focused training.

But all creative talent must occasionally overcome organizational and cultural obstacles to bring unsettling concepts and projects to fruition.

However, to some people it would appear that some aspects of Chinese culture could hinder the creative process. For example, it is thought that the deference accorded by age or gender and the more hierarchical culture of many organizations could hinder the upward flow of ideas, particularly from lower-level staff.

Good ideas could come from anyone, anywhere in an organization. Even such otherwise positive factors as loyalty to one's work group and colleagues could reduce the flow of ideas between different departments and teams. The complexity of interpersonal relations and the preference for harmony and consensus may also blunt the sharpness and honesty of debate that creativity experts believe is essential for creative development.

But Chinese creatives seem to find their own ways to push the creative envelope. In workshops in the UK, the SMG creatives showed great ability to deal with some of these issues and in group problem-solving sessions. For example, the Shanghainese were as fast and as accurate as their American counterparts, according to a former senior BBC creativity expert.

Chinese broadcast management officials, of course, realize innovation is only partly about the creative skills of staff. How enterprises and firms are organized internally, how staff are motivated and rewarded and how they collaborate and compete are all crucial.

While competition serves a real purpose in boosting motivation to improve performance, it does have its drawbacks. In the Chinese media industry, it seems competition is the primary method deployed to improve performance. Broadcasters compete for viewers, and poorly performing programs are also ruthlessly pruned.

Producers compete against each other to keep their shows on air and compete for ever-higher advertising income, putting them under more pressure to perform than their UK counterparts.

Many Chinese broadcasters are ruthless in dealing with outmoded and poorly performing channels. But in its severe form, competition drives firms to become more risk averse, to copy others rather than invest in developing original ideas or to stick with existing poor content, preferring a predictable steady decline to taking a risk on truly innovative shows that might perform even worse.

The deleterious effects of intense competition can be seen in the US, where broadcasters desperate for the tiniest ratings advantage tend to be ultra-conservative and lean toward low-risk incremental innovations and me-too copycatting of rival's hit programs.

The UK lesson is that truly breakthrough innovations result from a complex mix of competition and collaboration - and actually very limited competition for income. Competition within enterprises may also be undermining creativity in China.

The amount of trust it takes to share ideas between departments can be fatally undermined by too much internal rivalry, and competition within R&D units can be truly disastrous when nurturing the tender shoots of new ideas.

On the other hand, forward-thinking broadcasters are working on ways to drive the creative spirit through the ranks and encourage staff to spend more effort on developing ideas.

One large Chinese broadcaster is offering large rewards for new ideas from staff - something successfully introduced a few years ago in the UK. Other enterprises are setting up specialized units tasked with developing program ideas, as is done in the UK, while another TV station will be increasing the chances of real innovation by taking on more risk themselves and off the shoulders of content suppliers.

It seems then that some of the most go-ahead Chinese broadcasters are seeking innovative ways to build the creative capacity of their enterprises and are willing to jettison old ways of working and organizing in the process. In some ways these State-owned enterprises may be more flexible and willing to change than their counterparts in the West.

Back in the UK, at the end of the recent project, executives from several British new media firms were overhead discussing the imaginativeness and cleverness of some of the new media ideas presented by the Shanghai producers - holding out the intriguing prospect of British creatives adapting Chinese ideas for the UK new media market.

The author is a former UK television professional and runs Imaginement.eu

(China Daily 11/08/2007 page11)