The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has launched the 9th Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) dedicated to the Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI). Founded in 2023 in Cologne, with 25 partners from 19 nations, EIT Culture & Creativity (EIT CC) aims to address the global challenges faced by the CCSI, which employs 6.2% of the European Union (EU) workforce but struggles with skills gaps, slow innovation, and limited scalability and growth. EIT CC will be co-funded by the EIT potentially for up to 15 years, with an initial grant of €25M to support Education, Innovation, and Business Creation. Its 2024–2025 Business Plan (BP24–25) marks the beginning of a journey towards financial independence. This is underpinned by a growing community of members, some 350 by 2025, who will invest to innovate in their own sectors. The partnership aims to create a sustainable ecosystem that promotes competitiveness, resilience, and long-term economic growth. Through collaboration, it seeks to strengthen industry practices, support innovation, and encourage environmentally responsible approaches, all the while enhancing the overall economic landscape for the future in a partnership with purpose. By 2025, EIT CC will train 1,500 students, support more than 90 companies (Start-ups, Scale-ups and SMEs), incubate more than 10 Start-ups through our incubation and acceleration programmes. It will also implement some 25 innovation projects across various cultural and creative fields: Architecture, Audio-visual Media, Fashion, Cultural Heritage, and Games. EIT CC will also spearhead efforts to enhance the resilience of the CCSI by developing modular Resilience Plans for organisations across Europe. By 2025, 60 pioneering stakeholders will be involved in the creation and adoption of these plans. Ultimately, EIT CC aims to become a holding company by 2027, investing in 50 of Europe’s top cultural and creative businesses. The focus is not just on creating a network but on fundamentally transforming the CCSI through facilitating long-term partnerships, moving beyond publicly funded projects and turning innovation into impact. The goal is to secure a competitive edge for the European CCSI on the global stage, while fostering ethical practices, the preservation of cultural heritage, architectural sustainability, and the competitiveness of the European games industry, and addressing challenges such as fast fashion and media ethics.

The mission of the EIT Community Strategic Synergies (EIT CSS) is to facilitate and foster collaboration across EIT Community in key thematic areas identified in the EIT SIA 2021-207 and EU policy priorities. By bringing together and promoting cooperation across the different KICs involved, the EIT SCC elevates the EIT Community’s visibility and impact in key areas to drive a systemic change in Europe. By gathering EIT Community’s answers to strategic challenges in one cluster, the EIT CSS creates links between programs that would otherwise never meet, it increases scalability of actions and results, it improves efficiency in terms of management and implementation of processes, and attract new sources of fundings. The EIT CSS builds on the diverse expertise and knowledge of the KICs involved and, inspired by the holocaracy management framework yet aligned with EIT’s recommendations, it positions itself as unique community to address some of today’s most pressing challenges for Europe in four areas: : 1. Artificial Intelligence: by providing solutions for a human-centric implementation of AI that can best address its societal, business, environmental and regulatory challenges but also contributing to the ambitious Deep Tech Talent Initiative (DTTI) initiave; 2. New European Bauhaus (NEB)by supporting community-based capacity building initiatives and start-ups to accelerate the shift towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and beautiful Europe and contributing therefore to the Green Deal; 3. Women Entrepreneurship: by promoting a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem, mainstreaming business opportunities and increased the share of women-led innovation in the market; 4. Circular Economy: facilitating the shift from a linear to a circular economy model by connecting and engaging the different stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem.

The Cross-KIC Global Outreach programme was established in 2018 to narrow the competitive innovation gap between Europe and other leading markets around the world. It connects the EIT’s innovation ecosystem with those of strategic innovation valleys worldwide, securing the EU and EIT’s position on the global innovation map as a leading player. The EIT Global Outreach has developed and implements a unique, efficient and agile method that delivers high-impact activities in strategic outreach locations, executing the EC’s bilateral agreements in line with international priorities to create significant value for the European economy. The Global Outreach forges synergies, provides access, and generates success stories with global innovation leaders. It enables innovations to be launched on the global market, supports startups in attracting investments, facilitates cross-border consortium building and more. To date the Global Outreach cluster consistently exceeds its core KPIs, with 27 innovations launched on the market, and over €84M investments raised by supported startups and scaleups. The Global Outreach is active in the following strategic locations: Hubs: EIT Hub Silicon Valley (established 2018), EIT Hub Israel (established 2019), EIT Hub UK (established 2024) Pilot locations: US East Coast (2022, 2023, 2024), Japan (2023) Canada (2024) The Global Outreach innovation Hubs and the Global Platform, which operates pilot programmes in key locations, have developed specialized expertise in driving global impact. Their organizational knowledge spans open innovation, global market access strategies, cross-border consortium building, and more. The cluster runs a variety of results-driven programmes worldwide, each tailored to the technology development lifecycle—from ideation to global market launch. These include open innovation programmes for corporates, go-to-market programmes that help startups and scaleups enter new markets, lab-to-market education for researchers turning breakthrough technologies into startups, and consortium building for Horizon Europe open calls.

The Cross-KIC Strategic Education Cluster (Edu Cluster) is an unprecedented endeavour to integrate, systematise and leverage education activities from different KICs, create joint offerings, and open new opportunities for raising EIT’s profile and market penetration. By ensuring interactions and synergies between KICs’ educational activities, the Edu Cluster creates cross-cutting opportunities, fosters peer-learning, and allows efficiency gains. As a result, EIT partners are equipped to innovate solutions to global challenges tackled by European policies, most notably the Green Deal and the Deep Tech Talent Initiative (DTTI). The different Work Packages (WPs) comprising the Edu Cluster reflect the need for transversality of EIT’s educational offer. WP2 will develop, execute, and scale the DTTI by training one million deep tech talents by 2025, therefore contributing to the new European Innovation Agenda. WP3 will build on its success with the Girls Go Circular project by expanding its educational resources and reach to all EU member states. WP4 will support the long-term sustainability of the EIT Alumni community while ensuring inclusion and diversity. WP5 will scale up the EIT Virtual Campus (VC) through upskilling or reskilling learners with competences in line with market demand. EIT VC will become the go-to educational portal to address knowledge needs in Europe and complement the resources of higher education institutions. WP6 will explore a mode of operation with the platform consortium (hereafter InnoNext)for the EU Next Generation Innovation Internship scheme and coordinate integration into the scheme with the KICs. The Edu Cluster, in synergy with other Cross-KIC Clusters and the HEI Initiative, will keep strengthening the Cross-KIC offering along the entire education value chain.

The Shared Services Cross-KIC’s objective is to identify and create opportunities for KICs to achieve synergies across different common area of concern. EIT KICs by design have a specific status that requires them to adhere to requirements set by EIT and the EC in order to be eligible to receive funding. The Shared Services Cross-KIC tackles these requirements (largely specified in the Call document) through different activities: (1) CLC Consolidation to achieve efficiency and impact in building the required KICs’s presence in Europe while enabling facilitate collaborations; (2) Communicate and Disseminate the results of KICs activities and engage with the EU policy debate through EIT Community common events (InnovEIT, CLC Open days) as well as flagship premises to engage with specific ecosystems (EIT House Brussels, EIT Hub Budapest), and (3) comply to operational requirements with an efficient and common approach, such as joint procurement of Audits for CFS, verification on New Partners, and a common IT tooling to manage the EIT Grant and related reporting.