Cross-innovation success factors for the cultural and creative industries

Questions and aims

Interdisciplinary and cross-industry cooperation will become increasingly important for the innovation culture of national economies in the future. In particular, in light of changed customer expectations and regulatory requirements but also voluntary commitment, the transformation areas of sustainability and digitalisation place high demands on companies. In the cultural and creative industries, cooperation and collaboration practices have long been an integral part of working practice. This sector has developed innovative forms of cooperation and ways of working such as design thinking, co-working spaces, crowdsourcing, or crowdfunding. On behalf of Germany’s Competence Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Prognos analysed the conditions for successful cooperation between creative professionals and businesses.

Our approach

Studies on innovation behaviour show that companies that increasingly rely on services from the cultural and creative industries perform significantly better in their innovation dynamics than other companies. Based on selected case studies and interviews with experts, the project team identified different success factors for cross innovation. Networks, intermediaries, and cross-innovation platforms were used to look at potential case studies.

A total of nine cross-industry innovation projects were analysed. Where possible, interviews were conducted with one creative person and one company representative. In addition, the experiences of intermediaries and employees of the cross-innovation platforms were reflected. These case studies have been used to identify key success factors for cross-innovation projects between the cultural and creative industries and other businesses.

Core results

The success factors can be summarised in three clusters:

• Factors upstream of the cooperation and innovation process (e. g. educational work, expectation management, etc.)
• Factors related to the cooperation process (e. g. process format, environment, use of creative methods, etc.)
• Social success factors (e. g. collaborative mindset, common language, trust, identification with task, etc.)

Links and downloads

The Dossier (PDF, Website Kreativ-bund.de, in German)

More about our work in this project (in German)

Project team: Roman Bartuli and Kathleen Freitag

Last Update: 5 July 2022