This week I had the opportunity to attend the Creativity World Forum in Ghent, basically mentioning how regional governments, enterprises and individals can compete and benefit in the so-called creative economy. The event was comprised of two days of conferences and workshops, with some cocktails and extensive networking thrown in between as it happens in this kind of events.

Generally I can say that I was inspired by the congress, but there is still left one nagging feeling that the word “World” is slightly too pretentious in the name, given that there was nobody from two continents (South America and Africa) and the vast majority of the participants were Belgians from Flanders. However, I believe that it was a very good initaitive by the local government and it’s interesting to see the already the rise of the region-state that had been predicted by Thomas L. Friedman and Kenichi Ohmae.