Empowering the Cultural and Creative Industries to Boost Systemic Innovation for Sustainable Climate Transition (EMCCINNO)

Climate change is forcing significant and far-reaching changes in society. The cultural and creative industries can play a crucial role in addressing these changes, especially at the local level. They can raise awareness, highlight conflicts, create spaces for dialogue, and change perspectives and perceptions. This also opens up opportunities for cultural and creative organizations to become more sustainable and innovative.

The EMCCINNO project will test, refine, validate, and scale five sustainable business models of cultural and artistic social enterprises in Hungary, Spain, Portugal, France and Germany. Researchers will study how these enterprises contribute artistically, environmentally, and socio-economically to sustainability transformations to support the European Union's climate goals. Social enterprises within the cultural and creative industries often work closely with local stakeholders. Their links to urban societies grant them valuable insights into the social and environmental changes affecting communities and their needs and opportunities. They can use this knowledge to develop creative and innovative approaches for transformations in their local sphere of influence and their respective areas and sectors.

At the same time, small and medium-sized social enterprises in the cultural and creative industries are exposed to great uncertainty due to limited and fragmented resources. These challenges prevent them from long-term planning and the free development of ideas but also weaken their resilience, especially in the face of budget cuts and climate change, forcing them to adapt established routines and practices. Cultural institutions participating in EMCCINNO will develop and test new formats, routines, and approaches to strengthen their adaptability while developing climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. The participating artists and cultural managers will be accompanied and supported by an international team of scientists, supporting a tailoring of the prototypes to local conditions, while also allowing for a comparative evaluation across all five countries. The findings of this research will be disseminated in international networks to make them available to culturally and artistically oriented social enterprises across Europe and thus scale the project's impacts.

EMCCINNO will achieve its objectives by:

EMCCINNO will develop and validate customised sustainable business models for cultural and artistic social enterprises as the nucleus of a co-creative community and in cooperation with political decision-makers and other interested organisations. In a second step, these models will be reviewed, refined and made available to the public online. The project's iterative approach will ensure continuous improvement, with insights feeding back into the co-creation process to strengthen impact. RIFS will lead the accompanying research effort, generating insights into sustainable transformation processes in cultural and artistic social enterprises and sharing these findings with the scientific communities.

About EMCCINNO

EMCCINNO is an EU Horizon project with a duration of three years (February 2024 to January 2028) and will receive 3.1 million euros in funding. The project is coordinated by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS).

• The other scientific and non-scientific partners are: University of Aix-Marseille & Friche La Belle de Mai (Marseille, France), Center for Art and Urbanistics ZK/U (Berlin, Germany), Centro de Estudios Sociais & Jazz ao Centro Clube (Coimbra, Portugal), EMES International Research Network (Madrid), Be.Time (Vejer de la Fronteira, Spain), Green Formation & KÖME - Association of Cultural Heritage Managers (Budapest, Hungary), Culture Action Europe, Nomad Garden *