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

Image created by the hackathon participants

Rethinking innovation funding for cultural and creative industries

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 often hold expectations that do not align with the slower pace, smaller scale, or community-driven nature of creative innovation.

At the same time, cultural and creative practitioners frequently 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 as a tool for systemic change

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 that focus on building digital prototypes, these events invite participants to work with future scenarios and cross-sectoral insights to reimagine policy topics from innovation infrastructure to funding models.

By combining creativity with foresight, the hackathons create space for CCIs to demonstrate their potential role in shaping future societies.

True to ekip’s experimental spirit, participants co-designed zines that captured provocations and actionable insights. These zines functioned as playful yet powerful tools for discussing policy and innovation, while embodying the participatory and rebellious tradition of the format.

Through imagination, metaphor-building, and collective sense-making, participants challenged assumptions and envisioned new ways to strengthen the sector’s innovation capacity.

Key takeaways from the hackathon

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

Several insights stood out:

• New narratives are needed. CCIs remain underrepresented in innovation policies partly because existing narratives fail to articulate their value and reduce impact to simplistic measurement tools. 

• Creativity is not a quick fix. Meaningful inclusion of CCIs requires open-ended, explorative, cross-sectoral innovation processes not temporary artistic interventions.

• Funding language is a barrier. Policy jargon, buzzwords, and rigid KPIs alienate practitioners and obscure the societal change their work can generate.

• Success must be redefined. Innovation should not be measured only through economic KPIs, but through social value, cultural cohesion, community growth, and long-term ecosystem impact.

• Silos must be broken. Cross-sectoral innovation requires time, trust, shared language, and investment in relationships before systemic change can emerge.

While the sessions did not deliver final answers, they generated collective clarity: the system does not need minor tweaks it needs creative reimagining.

The message was clear: stop asking CCIs to fit outdated innovation models; start building models that fit the futures we want to create.

What comes next

ekip is currently preparing a publication that will share all the zines created during the hackathon. A toolbox will also be released for communities that want to recreate the zine-making exercise in their own contexts.

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