Hacking futures for cultural and creative industries: sustainable models for innovation funding

Does current funding for innovation match the characteristics and ambitions of Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs)?

Public funding models tend to prioritize short-term projects, market-driven KPIs, and highly ambitious results produced from relatively small investments. Private investors have expectations that do not always align with the slower pace and smaller scale of ambitions guiding creative businesses or do not consider community-driven and artistic innovation processes ‘investable’. At the same time, creative and cultural practitioners often lack entrepreneurial skills that would help them pitch, scale and market their innovations. In late June 2025, partners from the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision hosted Hacking futures for cultural and creative industries: sustainable models for innovation funding. Across two online sessions, CCI practitioners, funders, investors, innovation networks, and policymakers came together to “hack” new approaches to innovation funding.

FUTURE FORWARD HACKATHONS

Future Forward Hackathons are ekip’s method for translating emerging societal, technological, and environmental priorities into forward-looking opportunities for the CCIs.  Unlike traditional hackathons where participants develop digital prototypes, these events invite participants to work with future scenarios and cross-sectoral insights to reimagine a range of policy topics from innovation infrastructure to models of funding. By combining creativity with foresight, the hackathons create space for CCIs to demonstrate their potential role and impact in shaping future societies.

True to ekip’s experimental spirit, participants of this edition co-designed zines that captured provocations and actionable insights. These zines served as both playful and accessible tools for talking about policy and innovation, while also embodying the rebellious, participatory tradition of the format. In creating them, participants collectively practiced the art of imagination; challenging existing assumptions, inventing new metaphors, and envisioning fresh ways to strengthen the sector’s innovation capacity.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THE HACKATHON

The zine-making exercise helped surface tensions between how innovation is typically funded and how culture and creativity actually generate impact.

A few key insights stood out:

We need to craft new narratives to articulate the role of CCIs as a missing piece in innovation ecosystems that often misunderstand the value of culture and creativity or reduce it by applying simplistic measurement instruments. The lack of such narratives is one of the reasons why CCIs are still largely underrepresented in innovation policies and why CCIs themselves do not see themselves fitting into existing innovation infrastructures. 

We must recognise that creativity isn’t a garnish or quick fix. Meaningful inclusion of CCIs into innovation processes goes far beyond temporary artistic interventions or commissioning of creative companies to produce predefined outputs. Innovation processes should create room for open-ended and explorative cross-sectoral investigation where cultural and creative practitioners can contribute to systemic change.

Innovation funding language is a barrier for the CCIs. Policy buzzwords, jargon, and prescriptive KPIs clash with the playfulness and curiosity which is required for innovation. Reading the abstract and vague policy language, practitioners struggle to see how their work will lead to concrete societal changes that they care about and might feel alienated from engaging in innovation processes.

We have an opportunity to redefine success. The “projectification” culture in innovation processes forces innovators to adopt tunnel-vision and work only towards predefined goals which does not allow for much flexibility, while success is measured through KPIs, progress benchmarks and economic value. But perhaps this is not the only model of success. What would the definition of success look like if we put social value, cultural cohesion, community growth and long-term impact on ecosystem development in its centre?

The silos must be broken. Cross-sectoral collaboration doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. It requires investment, time, and meaningful exchanges. And only after we build relationships, develop common language and agree on the shared values, can we expect system-changing innovation to emerge from cross-sectoral engagements.

While the sessions didn’t produce definitive answers, they generated collective clarity: the system doesn’t just need tweaking, it needs creative reimagining. The call is clear: Stop asking CCIs to fit outdated innovation models. Start building models that fit the futures we want to create.

We are currently working on a publication to share all the produced zines and we will soon share a toolbox for those who would like to recreate this zine-making exercise with their own community.

This activity was organized by ekip. It builds on the first ekip hackathon, Innovation infrastructures for the Creative and Cultural Industries, held during Creative Skills Week in Amsterdam in October 2024.