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What is this creative economy? It is an economic system that relies most on ideas to serve as its major capital, instead of services or physical capital. Take Google for example. In an economy based on ideas, the potentialfor breakaway successes like Google is far greater.

According to Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure,Community and Everyday Life, members of the creative class are very different from those who are employed in the manufacturing, service or agriculture industries. They contribute to our economy primarily by producing the new forms and ideas exploited by our various industries and decision-makers.   What Florida terms the “super creative core” of this new class includes “scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designersand architects, as well as the ‘thought leadership’ of modern society: non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers.”

What sets a creative city apart from a non-creative city? Florida proposes that it is the “three Ts of economic development”: technology, talent and tolerance.

On June 9-11, 2009, the Martin Prosperity Institute, in partnership with the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the City of Toronto - Economic Development, Culture & Tourism Division, will be hosting the inaugural Placing Creativity Conference at the MaRS Centre, 101 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The Conference brings together diverse stakeholders from government, the private sector and the academic world to explore the importance of mapping culture in relation to creative spaces and places.

"The mission of Placing Creativity is to advance the understanding and practice of cultural resource mapping by developing reusable maps that showcase the cultural sector in Toronto and that can be shared with other jurisdictions and groups," said Kevin Stolarick, Research Director, The Martin Prosperity Institute.

Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District has combined the creative genius of science and technology with the drive of entrepreneurs and capital to create a marriage that will see more Canadian ideas commercialized in this country and for those efforts it has won the Canadian Urban Institute’s 2009 Creative City Award to be granted to MaRS on June 5 at the Urban Leadership Awards in Toronto.

“MaRS has found a creative way for science and business to collaborate rather than compete and to help Canada become a knowledge-based economy. This award recognizes them as a leader in stimulating the creative capacity of the city and advancing entrepreneurship, not only in science and technology but also in social ventures. 

Located in the Discovery District of Toronto, where billions of dollars of creative capital are created every year, the MaRS Centre first opened in 2005 in two new towers that bookend a heritage building that once housed the Toronto General Hospital. The three buildings, that total 700,000 sq. ft, house labs, companies of all sizes, business advisors and investors. Its professional services include hands-on advisory services, entrepreneurial programming and both structured and electronic networking. A second building phase of the MaRS Centre will add 750,000 sq ft and is planned to open in the next few years. “The underlining reason for creating MaRS is to capture the value of Canadian discoveries and to better commercialize these innovations at home in Canada,” said MaRS CEO Ilse Treurnicht. “Hub cities like Toronto are key drivers in shaping Canada’s innovation economy. MaRS works to strengthen the pull of that hub, acting as an accelerator and building the best ideas into companies that can compete on the world stage but are anchored here,” said Treurnicht.

How do we create the climate for innovation that will lead to new industries and jobs based on new goods and services we can sell the rest of the world?

We are not just calling for more creative class jobs, but for increasing the creativity content of all jobs - service as well as manufacturing and agriculture too

3Ts of economic development. Technology is the first T

MaRS Discovery District also received an award -- in the "Creative City" category -- for creating a space where cutting-edge research can be accomplished and turned into commercial opportunities. 

• Best Practices in Venture Creation (Room 1)Veronika Litinski, Practice Lead, Healthcare and Life Sciences, MaRSAn overview of what makes your business valuable to investors and how to develop a viable business strategy.

At the corner of College St. and University Ave. sits a growing monument to this kind of original thinking. MaRS – short for Medical and Related Sciences – is all about a building becoming much more than the sum of its users and programming. Already, MaRS has become a global leader in biotech research; it has certainly become a city builder, creating jobs and spawning companies; and, of course, it does all this by being a creative cauldron – just like the film festival.