Organza is a unique collaboration between institutions and organizations from all over Europe with an expertise in creative entrepreneurship, innovation, design support, education and the like. Building on the partners’ varied experiences and contexts, Organza aims to investigate the necessary conditions for the success of creative and design-led industries. From there, the project will make policy recommendations to authorities at all levels (regional, local, national, European).

Background

In Europe, many local and regional initiatives are being developed to foster the growth of the creative industries or their restructuring. However, these initiatives often lack critical mass, access to good practices and relevance with their context, to really help the competitiveness of creative industries. Organza therefore addresses the conditions of change and growth of creative industries. The project focuses on medium-sized regions and cities that have incomplete production structures and face a brain drain of creative talent to larger cities. This has a knock on effect in terms of sustainable growth, social cohesion and the ability to attract new initiatives. The challenge is to boost entrepreneurship but also to foster industrial change as well as to create synergies between creativity and industry.

Objectives

Organza aims at improving policy-making in the field of creative industries and to strengthen regional economies by developing and evaluating new policy instruments, sharing experiences between different European regions and medium-sized cities. To achieve its objectives Organza brings together 13 partners with different models of policy development and which are at different stages of policy making.

Organza aims at creating a better understanding of policy development and implementation. It examines the entire value chain of creative industries from design to production including retailing and craft activities. Through publications and good practice presented in various seminars other regions will be able to benefit from the work of Organza.

Since it is a new policy area, methodologies are to be developed to enable partners to compare and contrast the structure of creative industries and the supporting infrastructure within their regions and assess the effectiveness of the many initiatives that have been developed to support them. The information generated will be collated into a major database to facilitate the sharing of information. From this comprehensive collection of data, a limited set of practices is selected for transfer between cities and regions. Focusing on the three stages of the policy process (creation, piloting and implementation), the transfer of experience and good practice will be evaluated by the project partners and the experience widely shared.

Partnership

Municipality of Arnhem (NL), ArtEZ Institute of the Arts (NL), WFB Bremen-Economic Development (DE), Cotton Textile and Clothing Centre (IT), City Hall of Iasi (RO), ‘Gheorghe Asachi’ Technical University Iasi (RO), City of Presov, Municipality (SK), Technical University of Kosice, Faculty of Manufacturing Technologies with a seat in Presov (SK), Nottingham Trent University (UK), Design Flanders (BE), Treviso Tecnologia (IT), Varese Chamber of Commerce (IT), European Business and Innovation Centre of Navarra (ES)

The Organza project is financed in part by the European Regional Development Fund under the INTERREG IVC programme.