by Malcolm Hyde regional director, CBI south east

In the last edition of these pages, I was quite taken with my co-contributor David Philpott's reference to the Oscars, Baftas and the entertainment industry in general.

It was only a small leap to link this with the UK's growth agenda and the important part that could be played by our creative industries sector.

The term "creative industries" covers an array of businesses, from music to film, computer games to architecture, advertising to media, which together contribute over eight per cent of the UK's GDP - and they have grown at twice the rate of the wider economy for the past five years.

The growth of the digital environment is driving huge structural changes in the sector.

It is shifting product boundaries, making geographies irrelevant and reshaping channels between business and consumers. Online piracy and fragmentation of advertising revenues are also forcing a rethink of commercial models.

There is much talk of the creative industries as if they were a homogenous group but, as the diversity listed above shows, they are not.

It is hard to think of them creating a cluster in any meaningful sense of the word and in parts of the country, the population in any of these groupings is too small to make such a claim.

Not so in the South East. With a growth rate twice that of the overall economy, we should examine how we can foster their development.

What would be the key elements of a strategy to support the creative sectors?

The first must be to allow companies to derive value from their intellectual property, generating sufficient returns to enable them to continue to invest. Then we must secure a supply of skilled individuals for creative roles, whether fashion designers, architects or computer programmers, to support the growth of the sector.

Creative industry companies are largely SMEs, so access to start-up and development capital is crucial, and we need to support the infrastructure to support the new business models.

And lastly, we can examine how public procurement can support the creative sector. From broadcasting and programme production, through advertising and design, to architects and civil engineers, public organisations in the South East have the opportunity to foster the development of these businesses through being challenging and creative clients.

Outside London, both Brighton and Guildford enjoy the status of being in the UK's top nine hotspots. These are very mobile businesses - so why not Kent?