CHARLES LANDRY: If Hong Kong wants to be a knowledge-based economy, it needs creative people. The only way a knowledge economy can function is if you have a core group of people who are creative. If you look at any knowledge base in the world, it is a combination of artists and scientists and businesspeople all working together.

Hong Kong's future economy will rely on strengthening the visibility of culture, because the cultural arena is the research and development department of the future economies. Those aspects of imagination are, in theory, rooted in all business disciplines -- from design, to marketing, to whatever -- and are what will make Hong Kong economically and internationally stable in the future.

For example, the creative industries in London employ about 11.5 per cent of the population, or roughly 400,000 people, if you add up all the people in fashion, design, TV, radio... . Together, they create the value-added chain. So Hong Kong, which is looking to add value to itself, will only survive if it is at the creative front-end of production. The arts is one of the main ways to "add value and add values" -- you add value economically but add values in other ways as well. So culture needs to be centre stage and people need to be more conscious about it.

We need to make it more explicit and open. All this area presents a major, major, major opportunity, but to grasp that opportunity requires looking at the educational curriculum: what is arts education in Hong Kong like? What are the strategic economic reforms? The economic policy? ... All of these need to be connected but at the moment they aren't because arts is looked at as a marginal thing, not as the central thing -- both as an economic driver and as a value driver, in terms of values. Once that is grasped, where value adds values, it suddenly becomes a major engine for growth.

It also took us a long time to convince businesses in London that they can make money from this, but once we provided the evidence, the rest was easy. That's why Hong Kong also needs to provide business with evidence that they can make money if it wants to attract investment.

What businesses and government in London saw initially was here is a theatre person, here is a dancer, here is a designer -- they viewed everything in a disconnected way. But when you look at them closely, the theatre person connects to the music person, who connects to the graphic design person because he does the artwork ... so suddenly when you connect them, you get from 20 small boxes to one big box, or one big industry.

So once businesses saw this, and we told them that the creative industries employ 11 per cent of London's workforce and earn more than the car export and engineering industries, then they got the picture.

It needs to have a conception of clarity of what it is trying to do, to provide the conditions for the development of creativity, rather than planning everything. There is a danger of planning too much, because -- by its very nature -- no one can predict what direction creativity is going to take.

But the first thing it needs to do is to map what elements exist. Nobody really knows what is there. It needs to provide the evidence of what is already there. Secondly, it needs to work out what the role of any funding agency is. I think that should be a facilitation role, rather than saying, "we will provide an opera house, we will build facilities, we will do this, we will do that."

It should look at key questions of software and hardware -- the software is cultural exchange, networking. It should then make the economic connection between planning and social policy.

All this is not going to happen in five minutes, but if Hong Kong starts to be strategic today, there will be a result in five years time.

The other things that all need to happen are invisible and difficult. Like education, you need lots of art in the curriculum -- the effects of which will only be seen in 10 years time. There needs to be some serious long-term strategic thinking. There needs to be focus on human capital development. All this arts stuff at the end of the day is really about development of human potential.

Because business people think culture just costs money all the time. That is why the connections between culture and business and planning need to be made. The first step towards that is creating the mapping document -- the evidence -- because then you can have a coherent conversation, and the businessman can't just say to you that you are a stupid, old cultural boring person.

But the cultural sector first needs to be clear in what it is trying to do and present its evidence to the business sector that they can make money. Once they accomplish this, and the culture of Hong Kong becomes stronger, this will bring in more investment, which will lead to many more advantages also.

The government, I think, probably thinks in boxes and departments. The main way to create the value-added synergies is by cutting across departments. A major link across arts development and economic development and between every sector has to be made.

Another link is between design and arts development. The West Kowloon project, for example, how that develops is incredibly important. If that develops in a certain way a major opportunity will be lost.

The danger is to say, "we have a physical structure, but what is the content?" You could manage it and say, "we will have performing arts, and an opera house and I will programme the events there, and people will come and enjoy themselves." Or you could say, "we will open it up and different people and elements will come in and interact with each other."