Given the socioeconomic and cultural origins in Europe when facing globalisation and digitalisation, the development of inclusive and sustainable creative economies in Europe is high in the EU policy agenda. The DISCE Developing Inclusive & Sustainable Creative Economies project was set to investigate opportunities for growth, inclusivity and sustainability in the sector. DISCE addressed the challenges by focusing on five broad themes and related tensions identified in the state-of-the-art literature on academic research and policy documents on the CCIs. The five themes included: 1) CCIs identification, mapping and statistics, 2) employment and skills development, education and training, 3) business models and innovation, 4) cultural diversity and social inclusion, and 5) policies and stakeholder participation. These themes formed the basis of the DISCE project and its work packages dedicated to solve the identified tensions.
Overall, the ambitious objectives of DISCE were twofold: 1) to support the development patterns of the CCIs within the EU through research on new value creation models and inclusive growth; and 2) to re-shape understanding of what ‘inclusive and sustainable growth’ consists of in this context, shifting the CCIs (and CCIs policy) towards strategic goals of ‘cultural development’ that encompass both GDP and human flourishing. More specifically DISCE work Packages were designed to address the overall aims with more specific objectives. The objectives of DISCE included (see WP descriptions more in-detail):
• Developing a comprehensive understanding of CCIs and their performance and contribution to economy and society through improved indicators and characterizations at national and at EU level;
• Understanding career perspectives, challenges and training needs of creative workers across CCIs sectors in EU;
• Mapping the creative HE and the training provided to future creative workers in EU;
• Exploring issues of inequality and exclusion in the CCIs and how they could be addressed through training;
• Gaining deeper insights in barriers to and enablers of new value creation models, innovations, employment, and growth at the firm/individual level in the CCI sectors across EU;
• Understanding earning logics between labour markets and entrepreneurship and the role of independent agents as a new disruptive force in renewing the CCIs in EU;
• Providing a new and encompassing framework through which to examine and support the role of the CCIs within processes of ‘inclusive and sustainable growth’ – addressing ‘growth’ not only as GDP, but also as cultural development (understood in terms of human flourishing.
Furthermore, all these objectives were designed to unlock the potential of the CCIs in Europe by providing more effective policy responses and recommendations for promoting CCIs to contribute to growth, inclusivity, sustainability and cultural development at regional, national and European level.
