PRE-WORKSHOP SURVEY

Purpose: open dialogue among participants about their understanding of the how CCI policy and open innovation ecosystems relate to their day-to-day practice. Spark ideas and ‘prime the pump’ for the remaining activities.

For this activity, we gave participants advance access to an online Miro board where they could provide and view one another’s anonymous answers to the following questions:

1. How connected do you feel to cultural and creative industries (CCIs) policy?

a. What role does policy play in your practice, at EU, national, and
regional levels?
b. What policies do you think you, and the CCIs more generally, need?

2. What is innovation for you?

a. What does innovation mean in your practice?
b. How would you define an ‘open innovation ecosystem?’

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

Question 1 resulted in responses such as the following:

• Need more policies that propel the role of public organisations (e.g. libraries)
  in innovation ecosystems.
• EU policy plays a role in validating involvement in innovation activities on new
  topics (e.g. before NEB it was not always easy to prove why involvement in
  sustainability topics was essential for our organisation.)
• Somewhat – I have the privelege of knowing how to feed into policy, harder to
  know we’re being listened to, and hard to reach the right levels of government
  to make a difference (oddly easier to feed into national than regional policy
  making in my location.)

Question 2 resulted in answers such as the following:

• Doing something new or applying a new technical approach in a new domain or context – I think I’m fairly aligned to the formal definition.
• CCI-driven open innovation can challenge the established notions about what innovation is.
• For innovation to be truly open it has to involve a wide range of stakeholders – not just those who would identify as ‘innovators.’

design fiction: Creative skills for innovation

Purpose: through a creative provocation, stimulate novel thinking and gather participants’ imagined futures for how the job market will look for the CCIs in the coming years.

Drawing on ekip’s prior social listening trends research, we devised five fictional future jobs that might become key roles in future open innovation ecosystems for the CCIs. These included jobs which may exist currently (eg. artist) but which may be greatly transformed through open innovation. The jobs were:

• Artist: Freelancer comfortable with generative AI and analogue making required for practice-based research in a community arts organisation. 
• Code librarian, Creative Code Exchange: Support creative practitioners to find, use, adapt and develop Europe’s largest library of creative coding projects.
• Experience Design Technologist, ConvergeEU: Blend immersive and convergent technologies and real-world design to work at the cutting edge of bold creative experiences.
• Lead Project Data Custodian, Cultural Data Cooperative: Project manager with extensive experience in data-driven innovation, open data principles and ethical data practice to maintain data standards and support expansion of the Cooperative’s work.
• Creative Communications Lead, CCI Impact Centre: Help us to communicate a vision for creative and cultural industries impact that maximises the role of the sector in Europe’s green and digital transitions.

In small groups, participants read a brief job description for each fictional future role and listed the role’s essential skills and experience, and desirable skills and experience.

Through the process of discussion, participants were able to unpack terms that may be unclear, challenge one another’s thinking about how current trends may evolve, and develop new thinking about how these future roles and skills may begin to happen in the present.

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

Taking the Creative Communications Lead role, participants said this imaginary future role’s essential skills would be:

• Public-facing for both policy-makers and CCIs
• English language
• PR skills, writing and digital literacy, eg. press releases and articles
• Social media and data processing

Essential experience for this role would be:

• Communication, ideally business for more structured comms
• Technical & digital literacy to communicate transitions – knowing vocabulary for this
• Awareness of green requirements
• Independence, but able to work in a team

Desirable skills for this role would be:

• Social media, content generation
• Awareness of legal requirements
• Speaking multiple languages
• Presentation and pitch skills -efficiently translating across sectors
• Using new technologies and AI solutions

Desirable experiences for this role would be:

• Experience with funding entities on a national and local level
• Great personal network of partners, media…
• Acquaintance with CCIs; a creative background

Interpretation: Translating Policy Into Practice

Purpose:

In this exercise, we asked participants to briefly read key points from existing CCI policy documents (documented in the reference sheet below) and to translate how these policies relate to CCI practitioner perspectives. We used the following documents as bases for discussion:

• The Horizon Europe Strategic Plan 2025-2027
• EU’s Culture and Creativity Regulatory Framework
• Creative Europe 2021-2027 Cross-Sectoral Strand
• Blueprint for the Development of Transition Pathways for Industrial Ecosystems (2022)
• The UK’s Creative Sector Vision
• Innovate UK’s Creative Industries Sector

In Miro, we asked each team to respond to the key policy points and translate them into their own practice and perspectives using the following the prompts:

• What do cultural and innovation policy mean to CCIs? What skills and
  experiences do you need to translate policy into practice? Also think about
  what is missing – in terms of practitioner perspectives, or cultural and creative
  industries sectors?
• Think about the jobs we discussed earlier, and the Cultural and Creative
  Industries, more generally. What do these quotes from policy statements
  communicate? What are the skills you need to decipher them and apply them
  to your practice? What do policy and policy recommendations do? Do they
  resonate? Support change? Offer guidance?

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

The gap analysis from the 2021-2024 Horizon Europe Strategic Plan discussion
panel looked like this:

Taking a look at the above example, participants discussed the gap analysis from the 2021-2024 Horizon Europe Strategic Plan specifying research and innovation gaps to be addressed through future Strategic Plans. By examining these gaps, attendees were able to debate whether they believed progress had been made on the gaps since they were first identified, how these areas relate directly to the activities of CCI practitioners, and whether the EU could benefit from greater global awareness of how other regions are addressing these areas. Participants provided reflections such as the following:

• What if we had a data-sharing infrastructure for lessons learned and contextual data sharing?
• “This is not culture” – what do people in communities think the role of EU-level funding interventions is? Often there is disagreement on priorities (eg. integration of minority groups). Understanding gaps between the public and policymakers about the intention of types of cultural intervention is key.
• Using digital models instead of real heritage venues to protect the venues.
• Accessibility of the arts – we need to continue to support the most participatory art forms and to strengthen the role of relativity as a skill accessible to everyone (not only professional arts, traditional sectors.)
• Designers who are successful in industry have informal spaces for learning – too much structure doesn’t give them the skills.

KEY Learning Wrap-Up

To conclude the workshop, participants convened to share their key inspirations and
thought-provoking questions from the experience.

FOLLOW-ALONG EXAMPLE

Some participants expressed a wish to encourage the EU to look beyond its own borders for innovation rather than focusing internally on developing innovation processes. Others focused on the need for being responsive to local needs and desires regarding innovation policy for the CCIs, and tying any wider objectives like green and digital priorities directly to the experiences of audiences and creators. Finally, participants expressed the value of being able to collaborate on a creative thought-provoking process with colleagues in similar positions around the EU to get a sense of what is happening on the ground in
different locations.