Support the growth of ICT-innovative Creative Industries SMEs

SMEs represent 85% of all actors in the creative industry sector. They co-exist with global players and often face difficulties in adopting state of the art ICT technologies and accessing finance. Moreover, they operate on fragmented and localized target markets and have to bear high market costs which affect their international competitiveness. In this context, ICT tools and technological innovation are fundamental for the creative industries and their competitiveness. They widen creative possibilities and improve efficiency in all sectors.

The scope is to stimulate the adoption and deployment of innovative ICT solutions by the creative industries SMEs. This can be achieved through collaboration with ICT providers and by accelerating and supporting the growth of European creative industries.

Technologies for creative industries, social media and convergence.

Demand for high-quality content and new user experiences is growing. At the same time, thanks to ubiquitous technology adoption, widespread use of mobile devices, broadband internet penetration and increasing computing power, the consumption of content anywhere, anytime and on any device is becoming a reality. Consequently, developments related to content creation, access, retrieval and interaction offer a number of opportunities and challenges, also for the creative and media industries. In order to keep pace with the trends and remain competitive, those industries need to explore new ways of creating and accessing content.

As such, the focus is in research, development and exploitation of new or emerging technologies (e.g. 3D and augmented reality technologies) for digital content creation to support the creative and media industries and for unlocking complex information and media and interacting with them.

The deadline for the Project Call is 23-04-2014.

Horizon 2020 is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe's global competitiveness. The program focuses on three pillars: Excellent Science, Industrial Leadership & Societal Challenges. Information and Communication Techologies –projects fall under the “Industrial Leadership” Pillar.

To find out more about the Project Call, click here.

To find out more about Horizon 2020, click here.

NB. Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation is organizing a seminar on Horizon 2020 and other EU innovation projects related to design (in Finnish). For more information about the event, click here.