Executive Summary

Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) have become an established and increasingly important area of policy development across Europe. Their role has expanded significantly – from being primarily associated with cultural production and heritage to being recognised as key contributors to innovation, economic development, and broader societal transformation. This evolution reflects a growing acknowledgement that creativity, cultural knowledge, and artistic practices are essential resources for addressing complex challenges, including the sustainability and digital transitions.

Over time, European-level policies, programmes, and initiatives have played a central role in shaping the development of the CCI field. These efforts have strengthened the visibility of CCI and supported their positioning within discussions on innovation, competitiveness, and sustainable development. At the same time, they have encouraged corresponding developments at national and regional levels, where policies and support structures have gradually emerged to reflect both European priorities and local contexts.

Despite this progress, the current European CCI policy landscape remains fragmented, as CCI continue to be addressed across policy domains – most notably in cultural policy, economic or industrial policy, and innovation policy – each with their own objectives, instruments, and institutional logics. This hampers the recognition and inclusion of CCI in cross-sectoral development initiatives and innovation programmes. While ecosystem thinking and open innovation approaches offer promising frameworks for overcoming these challenges, their practical application is uneven and still evolving in most parts of Europe.

This White Paper provides an overview of how CCI policies have developed across European, national, and subnational levels. It explores how CCI are conceptualised within different policy frameworks, how they relate to adjacent domains, and how their role in innovation is being shaped by emerging priorities such as digitalisation, sustainability, and collaborative governance. Particular attention is given to the dynamic interplay between policy design and implementation across governance levels, highlighting both opportunities and persistent structural constraints.

A key finding is that, although the importance of CCI is widely recognised, their potential remains only partially realised. Differences in national approaches, variations in regional capacity, and the persistence of policy silos all contribute to an uneven landscape in which CCI are not yet fully embedded in mainstream innovation systems. At the same time, emerging policy agendas at the European level – focusing on competitiveness, resilience, and the twin green and digital transitions – create new opportunities for repositioning CCI as integral in future-oriented innovation ecosystems.

In this context, further attention is needed to how these evolving priorities are reflected and operationalised in national and regional CCI strategies. It calls for more nuanced, comparative policy analyses and – both in European and closer settings – strengthening coherence across policy domains and governance levels. All in all, better understanding about how policies translate into practice, will be essential for enabling CCI to fulfil their transformative potential.