On March 17-18 2008 the Conference Board of Canada held an International Forum on the Creative Economy in Ottawa-Gatineaux. I presented the results of the GLA’s work on city benchmarking and creative industries. The conference gave me the opportunity to start working with Peter Higgs of Queensland University of Technology, with whom I collaborated henceforth, leading to the reports we produced with Hasan Bakhshi of NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and to the adoption of a new standard for measuring and defining the Creative Industries by the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). It also introduced me to the work of Will Page of the UK Copyright Agency and the vital concept of ‘wallet share’ – the clue to the relation between material and mental content that has informed my subsequent research.