For two decades, principles for organising and managing complex innovation processes have centred on openness, collaboration, and multi-stakeholder interactions. Such an open innovation approach allows handling inputs from several actors and directing them towards value-creating innovation. Open innovation and ecosystem thinking is even more pertinent in the era of green and digital transformations and other global challenges such as the energy crisis that are heavily impacting the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) and need fast policy adaptation. However, open innovation principles are still rarely applied as normal practice. Existing support structures and innovation ecosystems are not designed for this and there are few guiding policies to support creative and society-centred innovation and multi-stakeholder innovation practices. More effective policies are needed so that supportive ecosystems for complex innovation will operate according to open innovation principles. Ecosystem-centric, cross-organisational innovation must become normal not only for CCI ecosystems but for the innovation ecosystems at large.
Given these challenges, ekip - European Cultural and Creative Industries Policy Platform support the development of policies that make the use of open innovation processes into the new standard. This will ensure that supportive ecosystems develop a capacity to handle complex multi-stakeholder innovation processes needed to realise more innovative CCIs in Europe and the behavioural change they drive towards a more green, inclusive (fulfilling the 17 SDGs) and digital Europe.
