Culture and Media Agency Europe (CUMEDIAE aisbl) has joined a consortium of well respected social and economic research institutes, cultural managers and creative workers from six European countries, led by the University of Turku (Finland), in a three year long research project intended to reshape the economic and social perception of the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). The DISCE Project (acronym for Developing Inclusive & Sustainable Creative Economies), funded by the European Commission under the Horizon2020 Programme, aims to reassess the role of CCIs as contributors to growth, quality employment, competitiveness, and to the attractiveness and social cohesion of cities and regions across the EU.

Through a multidisciplinary qualitative and quantitative approach DISCE will work to

  • Develop more robust indicators of CCIs to facilitate a better and more comprehensive understanding of their performance and their contribution to economy and society, both at national and at EU level;
  • Provide tools for a better understanding of career perspectives, challenges and training needs of current and future creative workers across creative sectors, including a mapping of high education in the matter;
  • Explore inequality and exclusion in the CCIs, with the objective of gaining deeper insights in barriers and getting a clearer insight of enablers of new business models, innovations, employment and growth;
  • Promote a better understanding of both the labor markets and the entrepreneurship in CCIs, as well as the role of independent agents as a new disruptive force in their renewing in Europe;
  • Provide a new framework through which to examine and support the role of the CCIs in processes of ‘inclusive and sustainable growth’, understood not only as contribution to GDP but also as cultural development and human flourishing.

DISCE, sustained in top-down and bottom-up stakeholder collaboration in the local, regional, national and European context, will build its interdisciplinary research on three pillars:

  • Robust statistical analyses, mapping, and the development of new statistical indices;
  • In-depth case studies in ten European regions;
  • Active co-creation and interaction with stakeholders (academics, professionals, umbrella organisations, policy- and decision makers, …) to validate the relevance of the project and its policy outcomes and to guarantee long-term impact and

The DISCE project is set to start in January 2019 for a period of 3 years. Its lead coordinator is the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship within the Turku School of Economics (TSE) of the University of Turku (UTU) from Finland. The other research members of the consortium are the King’s College London (KCL) from the United Kingdom, the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) from Italy, and the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in Riga Latvia. The consortium is completed the European network of non-governmental cultural centres based in Sweden Trans Europe Halles (TEH), who will, together with CUMEDIAE, assume both the communications and the stakeholder engagement within the Cultural and Creative Industries.

 

For more information, please contact info@culture-media.eu

To receive updated information on the DISCE project, please register by sending an email to sthomas@culture-media.eu