ekip Events

The European Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Policy Platform consortium (ekip) is proud to invite you to its fourth policy lab for a day of learning, exchanging, and co-creating to shape concrete recommendations enabling the role of cultural and creative industries in crafts-led innovation. 

ekip is an EU-funded flagship-project implementing principles of open innovation to establish a policy recommendation engine driven by partners and the active involvement of 40+ CCI-networks. The main goal of ekip is to promote the development and adoption of policy recommendations for CCIs.  This enables CCI actors to participate in and contribute to the impact the recommendation has on complex innovation processes. 

About this policy lab

Crafts-led innovation refers to the process of using artistic/traditional craft skills, knowledge, and methods as a foundation for developing new ideas, products, or services. Crafts (such as weaving, pottery, wood carving, leatherworking glass blowing…)  can play a significant role in frugal innovation (frugal innovation involves creating high-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value at the lowest cost) by leveraging traditional skills and techniques to create cost-effective and sustainable solutions. Crafts can contribute to this by using resource constraints as an opportunity to innovate. Conversely, innovation can contribute to the preservation of traditional crafts and enhance their societal and economic value.   

The fourth ekip policy lab will explore the opportunities and challenges on crafts-led innovation, the ongoing policy initiatives, critical factors to be addressed, and actions needed to ensure the development of thriving open innovation ecosystems. The event is open to the following stakeholders:  

• CCI-practitioners/representatives involved in, or with an interest in R&I-projects on crafts 

• Policy makers on regional/local and EU-level involved in crafts-related implementation and research, innovation-policies and instruments  

• Funding organisations 

• Clusters and key intermediaries in the ecosystem 

• Civil society-stakeholders involved in crafts-led innovation 

• Academia undertaking research in the field of crafts-led innovation 

How to take part? 

The policy lab will take place online in two consecutive sessions, each time building on the previous session. We encourage you to attend both sessions.

1. 6th of February (14:00-15:30 pm CET) – introductory session with a focus on crafts-led innovation and practices today and the exploration of challenges and gaps in policies.

• We’re happy to welcome Prof. Bert De Munck from the University of Antwerp, lead coordinator of Tracks4Crafts, as our first speaker. De Munck will share insights from a recent mapping exercise that explores how and where craft knowledge is being addressed across Europe – and how these contexts shape craft-related policymaking. A little teaser – the findings reveal striking regional differences across Europe!
• Elena Raviola (University of Gothenburg) & Associate professor Marta Gasparin (Copenhagen Business School) – project coordinators of the HEPHAESTUS project, will continue with a second presentation. The HEPHAESTUS-project aims to fuse cutting-edge technologies with traditional craftsmanship, co-creating sustainable solutions in tools, methodologies, and business models for the future of European craft ecosystems. We’re excited to hear more about the project partners of HEPHAESTUS on how these solutions are tested and applied in local crafts ecosystems!
• Their presentations will be followed by an interactive group discussion on policy challenges, needs & opportunities related to crafts-led innovation.

2. 20th of February (10:00-12:00 am CET) – policy session with a focus on developing policy recommendations on crafts-led innovation and practices tomorrow.

We invite you to express your interest in participating by 29 January, 2025  via this form. Once you submit your expression of interest, we will contact you for confirmation of your attendance.

Link up with ekip!

As a work in progress, the ekip engine is continuously re-evolving. In order to do that for everyone we want you to be a part of our next steps. Stay tuned as we expand this platform to further support the impact and sustainability of the CCIs across Europe. 

You can follow our activities on LinkedIn, our newsletter, and be an active participant in this and the next policy discussions by registering to the ekip Community. 

More info 

For any questions on the policy lab, you are welcome to contact us at ekip@technopolis-group.com. More about the ekip-project: www.ekipengine.eu.  

We look forward to seeing you at our next policy lab!