Creative Innovation Lab (CREA-CROSS-2025-INNOVLAB)

Within the specific objective to promote policy cooperation and innovative actions supporting all strands of the Programme, promoting a diverse, independent and pluralistic media environment and media literacy, thereby foresting freedom or artistic expression, intercultural dialogue and social inclusion, the priorities of the cross-sectoral strand shall include to encourage innovative approaches to content creation, access, distribution, and promotion across cultural and creative sectors and with other sectors, including by taking into account the digital transition, covering both market and non-market dimensions.

Call Objectives

The Cross Sectoral strand shall support the ‘creative innovation lab’, which shall:

• encourage new forms of creation at the crossroads between different cultural and creative sectors, for example through experimental approaches and the use of innovative technologies;
• foster innovative cross-sectoral approaches and tools which shall, where possible, encompass multilingual and social dimensions to facilitate the distribution, promotion and monetisation of, and access to, culture and creativity, including cultural heritage.

The Creative Innovation Lab shall incentivise players from different cultural and creative sectors, including audiovisual, to design and test innovative solutions for key challenges, with a potential positive long-term impact on multiple cultural and creative sectors.

Expected Effects and Impacts

• Improve the competitiveness of the European audiovisual and other cultural and creative sectors: transparency, data collection and the appropriate use of artificial intelligence/big data, adaptation to the challenges and opportunities driven by the ongoing changes in those sectors;
• Improve the adaptation of the European audiovisual and other cultural and creative sectors to the opportunities offered by the development of virtual worlds (also called metaverse(s));
• Improve the production/financing and circulation of European audiovisual and cultural content in the digital age;
• Increase the visibility, discoverability, availability and diversity of European audiovisual and cultural content in the digital age;
• Increase the potential audience of European audiovisual and cultural content in the digital age;
• Accelerate the environmental transition of the European audiovisual, cultural and other creative sectors, in line with the priorities of the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus.

Project Partnership

In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:

• be legal entities (public or private bodies)
• be established in one of the eligible countries i.e.:
  • Creative Europe Participating Countries:
    • EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories)
    • non-EU countries (listed EEA countries and countries associated to the Creative Europe Programme (list of participating countries)
• be established in one of the countries participating in the Creative Europe Programme and owned directly or indirectly, wholly or by majority participation, by nationals from such countries. When a company is publicly listed, the location of the stock exchange will in principle determine its nationality.