Creativity is required in any work that a person performs in his life. Masterful creative works are the ones that humanity transmits throughout its life and preserves to remain with them forever, but the mediocre works disappear, regardless of their content, size, or form, because they do not contain the required, subtle, aesthetic, and creative touches.
From this standpoint, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth recently, over two consecutive days, presented a plan for creative industries map laboratories with the participation of 170 people, including 17 sectors whose work is related to creative industries. This is the first map of the creative industries that is presented in the first systematic attempt to define and measure these industries. The work could be done by understanding the dimensions of the creative sector and collecting data related to them and to the creators in the Sultanate of Oman. The aim of the work is to provide a comprehensive and realistic picture to decision makers that enables them to develop policies and legislation that enhance the creative sectors.
The Ministry indicated in its statement that the goal of the creative industries map is to increase dialogue and knowledge exchange about policies and best creative practices, in addition to laying the foundations for the creative economy in Oman to enhance integration and synergy between culture, arts, and education.
They aim to ensure sustainable cultural career paths, and develop talent support policies and best practices, besides enhancing intellectual property protection, and providing the required frameworks to support increasing creative activities on digital platforms. The map of creative industries includes many issues located in several sectors, including the publishing and electronic printing sectors, music, theatre, cinema, and other sectors.
During the seminar sessions, the participants discussed many topics, including creative and best practices and measures necessary to strengthen these sectors, in addition to the legislation and laws related to them.
All these sectors need to develop a cultural strategy for their development, while working to combine them with educational arts and creative professions to provide the best sustainable professional and cultural work, in addition to qualifying creative people in the fields of technology and innovation in the digital world. All these initiatives require the establishment of laws that regulate the work of creative practices, and the various arts can be promoted.
Today, creative industries constitute an economic, cultural, and societal force in any country. Hence, it is given special importance in the policies of countries and local economies. The last program of these workshops produced good initiatives in coordination and cooperation with the National Program for Investment and Export Development (Nazdahar) regarding creative industries by implementing three projects with an investment value of RO 15.4 million, and there are other opportunities to implement 8 other investment projects in the coming period and achieve many new initiatives in this field and sectors. These require more efforts to exploit everything that can be offered, and it also requires exploiting the cultural diversity of the country in all possible and available sectors considering the presence of technical and educated human cadres in those fields, which will achieve a lot of artistic and economic success for the country, in addition to employing more national cadres in those fields that we preceded us in producing many industries and creative arts.
Haider Al Lawati
haiderdawood@hotmail.com
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