The county is still very much an innovator with Toyota’s decision to invest more than £100million into its UK manufacturing branch at Burnston, serving to show how the area remains populated with highly skilled workers and first class facilities. But in recent times, such investments have been heavily out-weighed by budget cuts and job losses. The creative sector has been hit particularly badly with both QUAD and Deda losing their funding over the next four years, while the contract of the Big Screen is up for termination in 2013/14. On the bigger scale even the Natural History Museum in London is considering introducing an entrance fee for the first time since the 1980’s after having its budget reduced by 15%.

Professor John Coyne, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Derby believes that in times of financial difficulty creative institutions are often unfairly among the first sacrifices to be made, “at the moment it’s a time of fiscal austerity so everyone is having to cut their cloth. Because the public sector is in difficulty people start to fill their holes in and one of the disappointing things that tends to happen is that people think that cultural creativity is a ‘nice to have’, not a ‘need to have’. In that regard there’s a tendency to misunderstand just how important creativity and culture is in people’s life, their enjoyment and sense of self-identity, but also how much business it drives because actually the creative sector is a huge income earner.”

This comes at a time where the university itself has lost a £250,000 grant from the city council to produce theatre, on top of £750,000 from the Arts Council. Despite those measures Professor Coyne remains upbeat, adding, “Fortunately, the university is in a good position financially, we’ve got some very talented people. The cultural and creative part has never been stronger. So, we’ve got a little bit of resilience for us to adapt to the shape of the new reality and actually come out of it strongly.”

He has good reason to be positive too, for whilst on average university applications are down 1% on 2010 in Derby they are up an impressive 13%. This is something he puts down to the university’s approach to understanding what people expect.

He said, “We think that is because people recognise that we’ve gone about the business properly. We tried to use a bit of common sense and talked to our colleagues saying ‘forget that you work for the University of Derby now, put your mum and dad’s hat on.’ What would you be thinking as a parent if your son or daughter asked for advice? When we’ve got our professional hat on why should our thinking be any different from when we’ve got our mum and dad hat on?” As a result, measures such as all-inclusive fees have been introduced meaning no nasty surprises, while the university has always been renowned for it’s intimate approach to tuition and individual learning.

Such an excellent application turnout not only speaks volumes for the University of Derby, it is also great news for the city and surrounding area. In the short term the incoming students will help boost the local economy by spending in bars, shops, cafes and on leisure activities. In the longer term they will provide a pool of potential candidates looking to set-up their own businesses by going through the extensive branches of the university and becoming part of the local economy. So far, there are 63 businesses housed across Banks’ Mill, The Enterprise Centre and the ID Centre with more currently participating on university-run business support courses. Professor Coyne believes that in the current climate, taking a route down this avenue would be highly beneficial to both the graduates and the economy as a whole, “We’ve got to preserve our creative economy, then we’ve got to drive the aspiration for people to set up their own businesses and join that creative economy. We need new innovative ways of thinking because students can no longer go to university, come out and get a job in a large company in a graduate training program and it is all done for them thereafter. People have got to take increasingly their own future in their own hands and it means considering self-employment or joining small firms. It’s where taking an idea and making money from it is becoming more important. Yet there are challenges there.”

Someone to have successfully gone through that extended journey is Paul Cummins. Having graduated with a degree in Crafts, Paul then participated in the Enterprise Inc scheme to help him set-up his own business. Since then Paul, who lives and works in Chesterfield, has enjoyed many successes culminating in receiving a commission as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. This will see him create around 10,000 hand-thrown ceramic flowers, each one of which will be attached to galvanised steel rods and be displayed in selected venues around the UK before ending up on Cromwell’s Green outside of the Houses Of Parliament. His success story is one of several where the university’s incubation program has been able to help nurture the ideas at hand. Something Professor Coyne puts down to the diversity of the businesses looking to grow their

ideas further with the help of the university, but also their individual inclination to interact with one another, a trait common throughout the city and one that could stand it in good stead. He remarked, “In business support, there’s a lot talked about one-to-one business support, but that’s very narrow. If you can have a course where you’ve got five or six businesses with different ideas they can exchange ideas and start trading with one-another. That creative cluster is a natural driver in economics and in this city it works really well, everyone seems to get on well.”

And his prediction for the months ahead, “The first 6 months of 2012 won’t be easy because even though we’re not in the Euro we’re not immune from what’s going on in the Eurozone and our own public finances aren’t in the best shape. It will be tough but that’s where we need every ounce of creative innovation that we can get because, to put my economist hat back on, very often it’s the innovation in a product or a service that is the discriminator in whether people buy it or not.”