The Cultural and Creative Industries with its spillover effects represents one of the dominating business sectors in Europe and contributes significantly to innovation and growth in Europe. Especially at the interface with digital technologies but also in the fields of mobility, green energy and climate change the creative industries provide important impulses. The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts by the British organisation Nesta and the NICE Award which ecce initiated in 2014 are examples that showcase such spillover innovations.
However, right now the cultural and creative industries can not unleash their full potential since essential structures in the market itself as well as in European programs and policies are missing in the funding period 2014-2020, declares the European Creative Business Network (ECBN) in a recently published press release . ECBN is a not for profit foundation initiated during the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010 and founded in 2011 by the european centre for creative economy in cooperation with the Creative Factory Rotterdam , Creative England , Kreativwirtschaft Austria and Creative Industry Košice which represents the interests of the cultural and creative industries and currently consist of 60 members from 22 EU countries. ECBN’s goal is to support leading agencies, funders and intermediaries promoting the cultural and creative industries on local, regional and/or national level, and to improve the legal frameworks of the cultural and creative industries in Europe.
ECBN now calls on the European Institutions, especially Commissioner Tibor Navarcsics and Commissioner Carlos Moedas , to support the European Parliament's amendment, brought forward by Dr Christian Ehler MEP , to create a cluster dedicated to research and innovation in the field of cultural and creative industries within the Horizon Europe Programme and to provide this cluster with a budget of 3 Billion Euro.
Prof Dieter Gorny from ecce: “The creative industries with some 509 billion Euro in GDP value added are one of the biggest economic sectors of the EU, yet until now it has not been a major concern of the innovation policy. This must change if innovations are meant to be close to people. Now it is up to the future innovation policy of the European Union, which is being negotiated in the EU parliament during these weeks: The creative industries finally have to be anchored as a priority in the innovation programme “Horizon Europe”.”
ECBN proposes to scale up the European innovation programme and to focus it strategically. Investing in cross-innovation by a European Knowledge and Innovation Community (Creative KIC) is one of most important keys to ensure global competitiveness of the creative industries in the future, says ECBN.