Cross Innovation approach and the creative industries: a case study in the city of Lisbon, Portugal

Abstract

Given the cultural diversity of Europe, and the inextricable link between culture and creativity, creative industries also represent a great asset and a source of global competitive advantage. In this regard the EU launched the project Cross Innovation, aimed at identifying and sharing innovative experiences among the participating cities, and more specifically seeking to identify how the creative industries can interact with other industries in other sectors. This project was taken part by 11 European cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Birmingham, Stockholm, Linz, Lisbon, Pilsen, Vilnius, Warsaw, Rome and Tallinn. The purpose of this article is to describe the process performed in Europe and show that this can be used by other cities and even other regions to leverage the innovation process using the potential of the creative industry. It was utilized a documentary research on the project (reports, websites, documents submitted by respondents) and there was performed a field study, with personal interviews with those responsible for the agencies involved in the project (Town Hall, University of Lisbon, companies, including others) in one of the participant cities: the city of Lisbon, in Portugal. When researching the results of this project, specifically in the city of Lisbon, it is seen that there was learning in the sense of how the city can arrange a mediation policy from this process of rapprochement between the sectors of the economy of a region and Creative Industries, and the results in terms of knowledge generation are visible.