New Report: Unleashing the Potential of the Cultural and Creative Industries

The Cultural and Creative Sector (CCS) lies at the core of Europe’s creative economy. By turning creativity into innovation, it has propelled many of Europe’s Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) to global leadership, with their innovative capacity generating positive spillover effects across other sectors of the EU economy.

The new report “Unleashing the Potential of the Cultural and Creative Industries” provides a comprehensive overview of the EU’s CCIs, examining their structure, strengths, and challenges, as well as the potential impact of emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) and artificial intelligence (AI). It also reviews the existing EU-level support mechanisms for the sector.

The report’s ambition is to position CCIs as a key driver of sustainable growth and cutting-edge innovation in global competition, while also reinforcing Europe’s social fabric, resilience, and shared values to enhance well-being and quality of life. Moreover, it envisages a high-level launch event to bring together a broad range of stakeholders, ensuring that CCIs feature prominently on the agenda of the incoming European Commission and European Parliament.

The report highlights several challenges in fully unlocking the potential of CCIs, with intellectual property (IP) regulations being a key concern. Growth and access to finance are closely interlinked, yet the sector’s structure which is dominated by small and microenterprises that account for 99% of its actors, limits their ability to scale and realize their full creative and innovative capacity. As a result, many remain restricted to local and linguistic markets. This fragmentation is worsened by the fact that intellectual property rights and audiovisual market rules differ across the EU.