ekip launches European Campaign to reframe innovation: “Creatives are the missing piece”

The European Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Policy Platform (ekip) has launched a new campaign to challenge assumptions about how innovation is understood and supported in Europe.

Titled “Creatives Are the Missing Piece,” the campaign aims to raise awareness of the often-overlooked role that cultural and creative actors can play in enabling innovation, particularly at its earliest stages, where ambiguity, experimentation, and meaning-making are most critical.

The campaign was designed collaboratively by the ekip consortium, with input from communication experts, researchers, policymakers, and cultural stakeholders from across Europe.

“This isn’t about visibility for visibility’s sake,” said the ekip team. “It’s about systems. If we want innovation to be impactful and inclusive, we need to recognize the role creatives already play in shaping how new ideas take root and spread.”

Rooted in ekip’s Open Innovation model, the campaign highlights the so-called yellow zone—the exploratory phase where innovation begins. This is often where creative capacities are absent from policy structures.

The use of the term “creatives” is meant to speak across sectors while acknowledging the richness and diversity of the cultural and creative industries. ekip invites continued reflection on language and representation, aiming to foster more inclusive innovation ecosystems.

CAMPAIGN LANGUAGE NOTE: On the Use of the Term “Creatives”

As part of the “Creatives Are the Missing Piece” campaign, we would like to acknowledge and briefly address the use of the term “creatives” at the heart of our narrative.

We recognize that this term can mean different things in different contexts and does not always capture the diversity, professionalism, or depth of cultural and creative practice. In this campaign, we use “creatives” as a strategic shorthand to speak across sectors, policy, academia, and industry, while recognizing that this is not a one-size-fits-all label.

Our intention is not to oversimplify or generalize, but to make visible a structural blind spot in European innovation systems: the absence of cultural and creative actors at the early stages of innovation design.

We welcome ongoing dialogue about terminology. We hope this campaign creates space to strengthen—not flatten—the role of the cultural and creative sectors in systems thinking, policy co-creation, and collaborative innovation.