Blueprints for the Creative Organisation of the Future

“If you’re comfortable, you’re not ready yet,” Jamshid Alamati told the 320-seat auditorium full of creative professionals earlier this month at the ADCE Festival in Barcelona. The CEO and co-founder of Rome’s Pi School has a cheery, fun-loving disposition, underpinned by a deep passion for the creative industries. So while his general message ahead of announcing the results of his school’s collaborative white paper was that agencies and creative businesses need to change drastically or die, that sounded more like a fun challenge than a death sentence.

Maybe that sense of fun came from the ‘Creative Incubator’ collaborative process that produced the white paper over the course of a year, involving 82 participants from 21 countries and a mix of creative disciplines, from art directors and copywriters to AI engineers and fashion consultants.

The 2018 programme set out to address the most urgent and fundamental questions that the advertising and design industry faces at an organisational and structural level. It was tasked with proposing new business models and methods to face the current and upcoming challenges.

 

The first module took place in Rome, with participants debating the disruption of current business models through new technology and new concepts for autonomous organisations. 

 

The second module took the debate to Barcelona, exploring the clients’ point of view and discussing the creative work from an advisory and consultative perspective. 

 

The third module in Berlin took the conversation even further and wrapped it up, articulating potential paths of transformation for the advertising industry.

 

For the Creative Incubator's full vision of the industry’s future shape, the white paper is available to download for free from The Pi School’s website. It’s title is ‘Potential Models to Design the Creative Organization of the Future’. 

 

One by one, the report goes through each of the problems the creative volunteers found within the current creative landscape and suggests solutions that businesses can practically implement. From the lack of innovation culture to the challenges of attracting and retaining talent that plague creative agencies and companies, the results of the year’s discussion suggest practices that can be taken home and applied to creative organisations today.

 

The white paper ends by imagining models that put it all into practice. Here's a teaser of just a couple:

 

- “Metamoto is a crypto-currency fueled agency that believes in transparency and creating objective value for creativity. Metamoto has its own currency, and so do their employees (20% of their salary is in cryptocurrency). They sell those to clients with ICOs. The objective value is determined by demand/offer.”

 

- “There are millions of clients that need a campaign but don’t want to spend time, money, nerves… that it takes to work with an advertising agency. There are millions of creatives who have a lot of valuable ideas which they want to sell to clients. Ideas to Go is an online collection of great ready-to-use communication ideas which you can buy with a click.”

 

Jamshid is clear that the document shouldn’t be received as a set of commandments from on high. Speaking at the ADCE Festival he proposed that, like the future it advocates, the report will move forward in a collaborative, decentralised style and The Pi School invites people to contribute to and refine this guidance. But it already presents a future that’s exciting to imagine, full of digital nomads, decentralised organisations and experience-led approaches. Now let’s watch and see how creative industries make it happen.