AI and Cultural and Creative Industries
New European Bauhaus – CCIs enabling green transition
Immersive Media
Crafts-led Innovation
Platformisation of the Music Industry
Inclusivity in Video Game Industry
Cross-Innovation with Performing Arts
Fashion Transition: Eco-Design for Circularity
Cultural Heritage Institutions within Open Innovation EcosystemsZine – Hack the Future, then Fund It: Cracking open innovation policy through culture and creativity
Policy matters way too much for us not to engage with it. This co-created zine turns complex innovation policy topics for the CCIs (such as funding and infrastructure) into accessible, visual provocations. It invites you to rethink how innovation is shaped —and to use, annotate, and expand it as your own tool for dialogue and imagination.
Designed by Silvia Robertelli
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Key Idea:
Have you ever found yourself wondering what innovation driven by public values for the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) looks like, who gets to innovate and who gets left out, how we define innovation success, or how we learn from innovation failures? This zine invites a new way of thinking about all of this.
Purpose
Developed as part of ekip’s ongoing Future Forward Hackathons programme, our method for translating emerging societal, technological, and environmental priorities into forward-looking opportunities for the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), this zine is a result of a series of co-creation activities with CCI professionals, practitioners, funders, policy experts and researchers who collaboratively ‘hacked’ innovation policy topics such as public innovation infrastructures and sustainable innovation funding.
Through collaborative zine-making, we explored accessible ways of talking about innovation policy and turned the conversation into creative provocations.
The Hack the Future, then Fund It zine is both the outcome of these activities and the next step. We invite you to:
- get inspired to create your own
- bring it to your local policy maker
- discuss it in a reading club
- write in it, expand on it,
- make it yours
What Do We Mean by “Hacking”?
In this context, hacking futures does not refer to technical hacking. Instead, it describes a creative, critical, and playful intervention into existing assumptions about how innovation and policy are shaped. By bringing together diverse perspectives, speculative scenarios, and visual storytelling, participants “hack” a topic by:
- reframing how it is usually understood,
- surfacing overlooked values and practices,
- identifying gaps and opportunities, and
- imagining alternative futures that could influence policy thinking.
Hacking is a way of breaking open repetitive conversations to make space for new narratives, metaphors, and possibilities.
Why zine making?
Zines as a format stem from underground communities seeking independent and more open-ended ways to publish, build vocabularies of resistance, and mobilise together. It’s certainly not the typical format for talking about policy. The focus on visual language and unrestricted narratives might feel unusual or even uncomfortable in comparison to a typical policy paper… and that’s the point! Take on this challenge to step away from the usual policy contexts that might open new ways of thinking, talking, imagining and building the future.
Interested in making your own zines in a collaborative workshop format? See our how-to guide.
