Become a great enabler

credit: Axelle Bloch

The BBC should think back to the days when it served to kick-start the broadcasting industry, enabling its emergence in the UK and beyond. The need now is every bit as radical but it won’t be achieved by simply doing more of the same.

The BBC enabled generations of creators to make amazing programmes, to find audiences and enrich people’s lives with a constantly evolving and growing range of creative output. It has enabled kids to learn to programme computers, charities to get new vans; and done R&D for countless technologies. It has trained the technicians, creatives and producers who have gone on to lead the field in other organisations and countries.

Today, everyone is a creator and everyone can publish their work. The BBC can play a greater role in enabling the media of the future by engaging with its users as creators not just as consumers.

For the BBC to succeed it doesn’t need to do everything itself, but it must help find talent and offer a path to success; it must help to build a world in which content creators who succeed in finding an audience are properly rewarded. The more the BBC rewards everyone, the more it creates impact – economic as well as cultural – for the country as a whole, the more it succeeds.

Enabling this in the future might mean doing less itself, but stimulating more to happen. Being smaller is a worthy goal if it means the BBC can stop doing some things because they are happening anyway.

How being a great enabler translates to creative output and how it should be structured as the Internet transforms the nature of “channels” and “programmes”, and even the Internet, are all part of the adventure of the next few years.

Enabling things means knowing when to stop doing them as well as what to move on to.

Dominic Young (@dominicyoung)is the CEO of Copyright Hub