Computer games, design and interactive technologies will sit alongside the more traditional artistic pursuits of the visual and performing arts as part of Creative Scotland's remit, according to the team charged with forming Scotland's new cultural agency.

In her first major interview since taking up her post as transition director, Anne Bonnar stressed how Creative Scotland's interests will be wider than the two agencies - Scottish Screen and the Scottish Arts Council - being merged to form it.

"Creative Scotland is a new organisation," she said. "It inherits what was great about Scottish Screen and the Scottish Arts Council but it critically isn't the same. Creative Scotland has a wider field of vision."

The small transition team-of-three is based in the University of Abertay Dundee's White Space, an open-plan environment occupied by games companies, animators, and video-editing suites. T-shirts are the dress code of choice and it's hard to find a greying pate.

It's a young, dynamic environment that perfectly illustrates one of Bonnar's main points: Creative Scotland should embrace interactive technology, such as computer games.

"Creative people choose to express their creativity in whatever media they want to use at the time," she said. "So a creative person might work in film, they might work in dance, visual arts, computer games or design. They will make a choice and often move from one to the other. There's lots of transferable skills across the creative sector, so that's why we have to look at all of these things.

"We have to be thinking about the future. Are we people who deal with the past or are we about transforming the future? Creative Scotland's responsibility is to be the vanguard of this and understand it, and not just react to it a few years down the line."

Connectivity is a buzz word that Bonnar uses often. The lack of joined-up thinking towards the arts and creative industries is Scotland's biggest weakness, she said, and does a disservice to its biggest asset, the deep pools of creative talent.

At last count, the creative economy, as it has been dubbed, supported 60,000 people. Creative Scotland aims to get them connected. Bonnar has already entered into discussions with Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and higher education institutions.

"It's quite radical to have an agency that's going to deal across the whole creative economy," she said. "There isn't another national agency that does that."

In another marked difference with the existing cultural bodies, Bonnar said Creative Scotland will be a "big brain" organisation that will "have a well-informed opinion of what is right for the sector" and artists will be able to plug into for advice.

As an example, Bonnar said that a lot of the problems highlighted in last week's report by the Scottish Broadcasting Commission - such as commissioners overlooking native talent - would have been foreseen and dealt with had Creative Scotland been in place earlier.

Bonnar described herself as Creative Scotland's "midwife". She is due to cut the umbilical cord and hand over the fully-formed Creative Scotland to its new CEO on April 1 next year. It will inherit the staff and resources from Scottish Screen and the Scottish Arts Council, but also the traditional bête noir of the creative sector: money worries.

With the government demanding a 2% efficiency saving over the next three years, and dwindling resources from the National Lottery, Bonnar said one of Creative Scotland's biggest challenges is finding new and innovative ways to finance the arts in Scotland and encourage a more entrepreneurial culture among artists.

Tax incentives, venture capital, loans and corporate investment are all being considered. The traditional grant, it seems, is dead.

But she calmed fears that Creative Scotland will give preference to projects that promise a bigger financial return rather than those that are culturally challenging but less popular.

"It won't be in the business of taking money away from artists to give to others that are more economic," she said. "There's going to be a lot of interrogation on this. The point is many people who are creative individuals have creative and commercial ambitions.

"What we have in general in the arts can be an expectation that if you're an artist you have to be poor. So it's quite a challenge."