The EIT’s ninth Innovation Community is designed to strengthen and transform Europe’s Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI) by connecting creatives and organisations to Europe’s largest innovation network.

The Innovation Community offers entrepreneurial education degrees and courses as well as business creation and acceleration services and innovation driven research projects. The new EIT Culture & Creativity will capitalise on the unique richness of European diversity to guarantee that creatives are ingrained in the pan-European Innovation Ecosystem. 

„This will be an open innovation community: open to entrepreneurs, artists, freelancers, social innovators, cultural agents. Innovation and change are possible when all the players – the large and the small, for profit and non-profit – meet at eye level in collaboration spaces for addressing pressing societal challenges”

Bernd Fesel, Interim CEO and spokesperson of the winning team

The new community is designed to unlock the latent value of the cultural and creative sectors and industries to become a game changer for Europe’s Green, Digital and Social Transformation. The community is made up of prominent actors in the higher education, research, business and public sectors, spanning twenty European countries from Bulgaria to Ireland, from Greece to Sweden. The consortium is led by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, one of the world’s largest applied research organizations. EIT Culture & Creativity will run 10 Action Programmes (AP) to pursue five Strategic Objectives.

Committed to culture-based social innovation and digital cultural heritage by being the coordinator of the National Laboratory for Social Innovation (TINLAB) and the Digital Heritage National Laboratory (DH-LAB), and based on its educational and research excellence, ELTE – as a founding member of EIT Culture & Creativity – is ready to actively contribute to the new Innovation Community with an interdisciplinary approach.

The objective of the new EIT community aligns well with CHARM-EU’s vision on embracing diversity and the change needed to meet society’s challenges by engaging a wide variety of societal actors and stakeholders to create knowledge and innovative solutions. Social innovation is also a key theme in CHARM-EU’s Master’s in Global Challenges for Sustainability: the 10 ECTS module aims to develop in students the knowledge, skills and tools to turn ideas into action through an advanced understanding of the creative, communicative and innovation processes that drive sustainability transformations.