An EMBA for the Creative Industries
Film producer David Puttnam talks to the FT’s Jonathan Moules about his teaching work on the EMBA for the creative industries at Ashridge business school, in the UK. Lord Puttnam’s aim is to broaden understanding of the opportunities in the sector.
Source: Financial Times /Video
Lord Puttnam and Channel 4 launch MBA for media executives
In the week it emerged the creative industries contributed £84.1bn to the UK economy, Oscar-winning film producer Lord Puttnam and Channel 4 have joined forces to help launch a new executive MBA designed to give the next generation of media bosses the business skills needed to operate in the global marketplace.
Corporatising creativity has often been a thorny issue for the British media and arts industries.
The two-year course will cover what it calls the “five tensions of creative leadership” and prepare executives for the pressures of the job by teaching them about the “fear of failure” versus the “appetite for risk”.
Other lessons to be learned include “commercial constraints v creative freedom… competition v collaboration, automation v craft skills and long term v short term.”
The MBA has been designed, as Puttnam said, to ensure “that the creative industries are led by people who can skilfully and knowledgeably navigate companies through the challenges of the digital era”.
The multimillion-pound independent television production sector started out as a cottage industry but is now big businesses and content producers and artists now operate in a global market place.
Minister for culture and the digital economy Ed Vaizey welcomed the new course: ”The creative industries are one of the UK’s greatest success stories. Growing at almost twice the rate of the wider economy, they now contribute £84bn a year to the UK.
“Our nation has an incredibly strong track record for producing creative talent, but we need to make sure that the industry is nurturing future leaders with a strong and strategic business acumen as well. This new MBA is aimed at doing exactly that, and its launch is fantastic news for our creative industries.”
Channel 4 is funding six bursaries for the courses, which have been developed through Puttnam’s company Atticus Education and with the help of industry body Creative Skillset.
David Abraham, the Channel 4 chief executive, explained: “As the figures released by government this week show, the creative industries are a hugely important and growing part of the UK’s economy – and so it’s vital that we are investing in a future generation of industry leaders with the launch of the executive MBA.
“I’m particularly pleased that by establishing six bursaries, Channel 4 is able to further support social mobility within the media and creative sector.”
They have been designed by specialists Ashridge Executive Education, who will teach the course.
Research from Creative Skillset recently showed that many top staff lack the management and strategic skills needed to shape and lead businesses in the creative industries.
The MBA will teach them core skills including “innovation, operations management, creating strategic value, developing sustainable business practice, leadership, finance and managing globally”.
Source: The Guardian
Written by: Tara Conlan
Launch of the New Executive MBA for the Creative Industries
“It is essential that the creative industries are led by people who can skilfully and knowledgeably navigate companies through the challenges of the digital era.” Lord Puttnam
Ashridge Executive Education, supported by Creative Skillset and Lord Puttnam’s education company, Atticus Education, have launched a new Executive MBA for the Creative Industries.
The programme is due to start in October 2016 and has been developed with the strong creative input of Oscar-winning British film producer and educator, David Puttnam, and his organisation, Atticus Education, with advice from senior industry leaders including the Creative Skillset Board Member and Chief Executive of Channel 4, David Abraham.
The Executive MBA will be delivered online over two years with three weeks of residential face-to-face tuition taking place at Ashridge, based just north of London and an additional international business week overseas. It has been created specifically for those already working in a creative business or those looking to make a transition into the sector.
As part of Channel 4’s ongoing commitment to increasing diversity and social mobility within the creative industries, it will fund six bursaries for the EMBA – two per year across three two-year programmes. The bursaries will enable those who otherwise would not be able to fund their own placement to participate in the Creative Industries Executive MBA.
David Puttnam said: “It is essential that the creative industries are led by people who can skilfully and knowledgeably navigate companies through the challenges of the digital era.”
David Abraham added: “As the figures released by Government this week show, the Creative Industries are a hugely important and growing part of the UK’s economy – and so it’s vital that we are investing in a future generation of industry leaders with the launch of the Executive MBA. I’m particularly pleased that by establishing six bursaries, Channel 4 is able to further support social mobility within the media and creative sector.”
Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, said: ”The creative industries are one of the UK's greatest success stories. Growing at almost twice the rate of the wider economy, they now contribute £84 billion a year to the UK. Our nation has an incredibly strong track record for producing creative talent, but we need to make sure that the industry is nurturing future leaders with a strong and strategic business acumen as well. This new MBA is aimed at doing exactly that, and its launch is fantastic news for our creative industries."
Maintaining creativity while excelling at management are at the core of this important new Executive MBA. It helps realise a key objective of the Employer Ownership Pilot, which is to deliver an integrated management, leadership and business skills plan to help the growth and productivity of the creative industries.
This Executive MBA has been designed by world-ranked, triple accredited Ashridge Executive Education with the expertise and contributions of an Advisory Board of senior level professionals from the creative industries, and two experienced industry partners: Atticus Education and Creative Skillset. It is for those looking to gain the strategic skills and vision required to respond to global and digital markets. Students will learn how to balance the demands of creating a culture of creative excellence alongside the demands of a commercial enterprise.
Research from Creative Skillset* this year concluded that many senior professionals lack the management and strategic skills needed to shape and lead businesses in the creative industries; many are driven by short-term goals which hamper long-term strategic planning and business growth. If the UK is to maintain its position as a world leader in the Creative Industries, the learning and development of managers and leaders needs to be drastically improved.
Students will learn a range of skills through 12 subjects including innovation, operations management, creating strategic value, developing sustainable business practice, leadership, finance and managing globally. The Executive MBA will also address the ‘Five tensions of creative leadership’* – commercial constraints v creative freedom, fear of failure v appetite for risk, competition v collaboration, automation v craft skills and long term v short term.
The course features a series of talks by leading creative industry managers, practitioners and commentators to provide students with further insight into leading in the creative sector. Students will benefit from working with and networking amongst their own peers, allowing them to gain transferable skills across the whole sector.
Due to the flexibility of the combination of online learning and residential weeks at Ashridge, creative professionals can immediately begin to apply their learning to the workplace, without waiting until the end of the qualification.
Click here to find out more and apply for a place on the Executive MBA for the Creative Industries
On the 27th January, Lord Puttnam will discuss his role as UK Trade Envoy to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
This event will provide an opportunity to hear from Lord Puttnam about the outlook for these exciting markets and his upcoming visit to the region in February.
The session will also feature a Q&A.
For those unable to attend in person, this event will also be streamed live online.
Source: UKABC UK-ASEAN
Attacking the Devil: Britain's greatest newspaper campaign
“It was a story told in a way that made the heart beat faster and brought a tear to the eye,” said James Harding, the BBC’s head of news, immediately after the London premiere of Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the last Nazi war crime.
He was addressing a packed audience on Wednesday evening that included many victims of thalidomide, the drug given to pregnant women in the late 1950s and early 1960s to combat morning sickness.
Those women, their husbands and their offspring were at the centre of a documentary film that paid tribute to Evans’s long struggle on their behalf.
He and his team of Sunday Times reporters sought to gain proper compensation from Distillers, the company that produced and marketed the pill that caused thousands of women to give birth to damaged babies.
I’ve seen many excellent feature films based on real cases of investigative journalism, such as All The President’s Men, Kill The Messenger and Spotlight, but Attacking the Devil, by sticking strictly to the facts and making a virtue of having witnesses speak directly to the camera, outshines them all.
In so doing, the film-makers, brother and sister David and Jacqui Morris, managed to tell a complicated story that unfolded over the best part of 50 years in such a way that it was both easy to understand and shocking to contemplate.
Evans was the star turn. It illustrated his initial commitment, while editor of the Darlington-based Northern Echo, to campaigning journalism.
Once he got to the Sunday Times, in 1967, he found himself with a large and skilled editorial staff who, provided with a target, took aim at Distillers.
He and his team, who included Phillip Knightley, Elaine Potter, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson and Marjorie Wallace, dared to tread where other editors had feared to go.
They just wanted to tell the truth and dedicated themselves to a campaign that went on for years. The main struggle proved to be a legal one. Trial by trial, the film records the lengthy, tortuous and expensive fight to achieve justice in the face of an implacable foe and a compliant government.
For some in the audience, including several journalists I spoke to afterwards, the Nazi link was a complete surprise, despite it having first emerged in 2009.
It was then that Martin Johnson, director of the Thalidomide Trust, discovered documents which revealed that thalidomide had been developed by the Nazis and tested on prisoners at concentration camps.
It was created by a scientist, Otto Ambros, as an antidote to Sarin, a toxic nerve agent used as a chemical weapon that Ambros had, with four other men, previously discovered.
Johnson told the Sunday Times at the time of his revelation: “It is now appearing increasingly likely that thalidomide was the last war crime of the Nazis.” Hence the secondary title of the film.
Chemie Grünenthal, the German firm that developed and sold thalidomide, denies this claim. But it is surely significant that Ambros worked for the company following his release from jail in 1952 after his conviction at Nuremberg for testing chemicals on concentration camp inmates.
It is also the case, as the final moments of the film make clear, that the fight for compensation for thalidomide victims continues.
In Spain, for example, victims won a court victory against Grünenthal in November 2013 only to see it overturned on appeal a year later on the grounds they had sued too late. Evans, writing about the matter in the Guardian, noted:
“One of Grünenthal’s undoubted victims, Juan Carlos Vélez, 44, sits on the pavement in a smart part of Madrid with a hat upturned for coins. He can’t hold out a hand because he hasn’t any.”
With such stories in mind, and so many of the victims in front of him – people whose names and intimate stories he knows so well – it was no surprise that Evans shed a tear on stage at Picturehouse Central.
After being treated to a standing ovation at the conclusion of the screening he sought to get a message across about journalism: lethargy is its enemy; curiosity is its inspiration.
At 87, Evans remains as curious as ever. Lethargy is not in his lexicon. There were many veteran journalists in the audience but it would have been better still to have seen students of journalism.
Instead they should ensure that they see Attacking the Devil, which goes on general release on 22 January.
Bath Spa and Lord Puttnam’s Atticus Education launch online seminars on creativity in film
Bath Spa and Lord Puttnam’s company Atticus Education, supported by Pinewood Studios, have launched an innovative series of seminars in a module entitled ‘The Philosophy of Film’ as part of the University’s MA in Independent Filmmaking and MA Scriptwriting. The ‘Philosophy of Film’ module is also available for students studying other creative courses to take as an additional elective.
The seminars are being delivered by Lord Puttnam, the Oscar-winning British film producer and educationalist and chair of Atticus.
The seminar series began on Tuesday 12 January with a visit to the University by Lord Puttnam to deliver the first of the eight seminars in the series. Six of the subsequent seminars will be delivered to the University in a live, interactive format via the internet from the Atticus studio in Ireland, using Cisco video-conferencing technology enable by BT. The first of these is being transmitted to Bath Spa on Friday 15 January.
Throughout the module, Lord Puttnam, whose films include Chariots of Fire, The Mission, The Killing Fields and Local Hero, will draw upon his own distinguished career as a film producer to discuss the many and varied aspects of the creative process. Seminars will include, Why Does Cinema Matter? 120 Years of Cinema and Society; From Spark to Shape – Turning Ideas into Action; and Images and Emotion – The Role of Sound, Music and Cinematography.
Lord Puttnam said: “I am delighted to have been able to launch this innovative collaboration with Bath Spa University thanks to the generous support of Pinewood Studios. I’ve long believed that online learning should be at the heart of education, and this series of seminars represents a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate the immense creative possibilities offered by communications technology.”
Dr Terence Rodgers, Associate Professor and Head of the Digital Academy at Bath Spa commented: “This is a great opportunity for our MA students to have access to the wisdom and vast experience of the UK and international film scene that Lord Puttnam has to offer. The collaboration with Lord Puttnam and Pinewood Studios will also add significantly to the University’s continuing engagement with leading figures and organisations in the creative and cultural industries.”
Andrew Smith, Corporate Affairs Director at Pinewood said: “As one of the UK’s longest established film studios where legendary franchises such as James Bond, Star Wars and Harry Potter have been filmed or produced, it is fitting that we should support these seminars on the Philosophy of Film which looks at the history of film and what makes a great film. Throughout our history we have long supported the development of talent across all aspects of the film making process.”
The Independent Filmmaking MA is designed for aspiring film producers, directors, writers and others seeking careers in film and the wider screen industries. It aims to give students an industry-focused education in the business and practice of modern, independent filmmaking. Students from the MA in Filmmaking can develop and pitch ideas in collaboration with students from the MA Scriptwriting.
The MA in Scriptwriting is a dynamic, creative and practical course that offers students the chance to hone their writing for performance skills while also acquiring the necessary professional knowledge needed to negotiate careers in the industry.
Along with ‘The Philosophy of Film’, students also have opportunities to meet agents and specialists and to learn how best to pitch their work in a highly competitive field. Students also have the opportunity to produce their own films in collaboration with their peers.
The University’s MA in Filmmaking and the MA in Scriptwriting encourage their students to take advantage of the regional creative cluster that has developed over the last decade. Local filmmaking facilities include Aardman Productions, Bottle Yard Studios and Bath Spa University’s own studio and post production facilities. Students are also actively encouraged to submit their films to the Encounters Film Festival and the Bath Film Festival.
#LetsTeachCode www.letsteachcode.com
David Puttnam, National Digital Champion of Ireland spoke to #LetsTeachCode about why coding is so important.
#LetsTeachCode are working with policy makers, changemakers, volunteers and educators to get their commitment to help to get students all around the world coding.
