CreatEU – Entrepreneurship Up-skilling Education for Creatives, is a project developed and funded under the Erasmus+ programme having as its main objective to support the development of high-quality competences for the professionals working in the Cultural and Creative Industries in order to enhance the sustainability and profitability of their activities, and thus further support the development of the CCI sector in Europe.
The first, and very important output of the CreatEU project is to list and prioritise the key competences and key needs of the CCI professionals on entrepreneurship, management, fundraising, marketing, and networking, and to present a comprehensive and complete Competence Framework for the Professionals working in Culture and Creative Sector.
To develop a sound and clear framework, the partners were be based on the information collected from various sources and they followed a sophisticated methodology with different steps.
In the beginning a desk research carried, out not only in in each of the six project countries but also and all the EU27, identifying a number of initiatives, mainly EU projects, National and EU policies, Entrepreneurial Training Activities and schemes, in line with the project topic, collecting information and findings to update project assumptions and base future actions. The useful information collected through existing initiatives, projects, and good practices allowed the partnership to incorporate useful related knowledge and experience, and to structure a training process into the CreatEU project’s training scheme that follows.
The second stage, included a European-wide Online Survey, spreading a specific quantitative questionnaire, exploring key competences needed by artists, creative and cultural operators, and organisations. The scope of the survey was to identify the entrepreneurial competences, knowledge, skills, attitudes, that the professionals from the target group should have to enhance their work or projects, making it more profitable and sustainable. For that reason, the partners used the European Commission’s European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) as a reference framework to let the interviewees identify what they need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. EntreComp offers a comprehensive description of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that people need to be entrepreneurial and create financial, cultural or social value for others. EntreComp identifies 15 competences that describe what it means to be entrepreneurial. The research took place during March and April of 2021. The partnership managed to collect responses from 233 participants from 27 EU countries (including Serbia and UK).
Some interesting facts of this stage, was that the employment status of the majority was, employed 29.61%, Self-employed 27.90%, Entrepreneur / Company Owner 15.88%, work but not in the CCS 12.02%, while 28.76% of them have a University Degree and 46.78% of them owns a master’s degree.
The most common sectors that the participating professionals came from was Cultural Managers / Executive Directors / Creative HUBs (34.76%), Performing arts (28.76%), Visual Arts (19.31%), Music (16.31%), Film / TV / Radio / Video / Photography (16.31%), Policy Maker / Public Sector Officials (15.02%) and Advertising / Marketing (12.88%)
At the next stage, the partnership intended to gather accurate and concrete data, regarding the actual needs that the professionals and the “actors” of the Creative Sector have so, they conducted thorough and In-depth Interviews with experts from the 6 Partners countries. The experts mainly came from supporting and educational organizations within the CCI sector.
At the end, the project foreseen the organisation of a Focus Group (FG) with experts, stakeholders, policy makers, academia members, and mentors/coaches. The purpose of the FG was to discuss with the participants both about the project its objectives, activities, estimated results, but mainly to present them a preliminary draft of analysis and questionnaires in the previous stages and collect feedback from them that will be the used to validate the final results.
THE FINDINGS
Summarizing up the qualitative results and quantitative findings of the abovementioned activities the partnership came up with the following results regarding the skills and competencies of the Framework.
During the Online Questionnaire research, the ten competencies marked as more important from the 240 participants were:
- Creativity (Developing creative, innovative and purposeful ideas) – 70.42%
- Motivation and perseverance (Staying focused and don’t give up) – 65.42%
- Learning through experience (Learning by doing) – 64.58%
- Vision (The ability to imagine the future and develop a vision to turn ideas into action) – 62.50%
- Working with others (The ability- willingness to team-up, collaborate and network with others) – 55.83%
- Taking the initiative (Take up challenges and follow opportunities) – 55.00%
- Valuing ideas (Recognising the potential of an idea to create value for you or others) – 53.33%
- Planning & management (The ability/knowledge to prioritise, organise & follow-up tasks) – 52.50%
- Spotting opportunities (the ability to identify opportunities for creating value) – 52.08%
- Mobilizing resources (Gathering and managing the resources you need) – 50.83%
In addition, the participants indicated that CCI Professionals could also have the following skills:
/ Digital and New Technologies Skills
/ Networking Abilities
/ Lobbying
The In-Depth interviews with the experts that the project partners conducted with experts in each project country, mainly from supporting organizations and educational organizations from CCI sector, was based both on the questionnaire used in the previews activity with open-ended responses, exploring the competences needed by the target group according to the point of view of those working with them. During the in-depth interviews, the experts confirmed the previously mentioned findings since their responses were aligned with the online survey results.
At the final stage, the partnership organized a Focus Group in EU level, with 7 participants, representatives of the target group (CCI professionals, artists, cultural operators) and Policy Makers, Academia, Cultural Organisations, to discuss about the project – objectives, activities, estimated results, present them a preliminary draft of analysis and questionnaires and collect from them a feedback that will be the base for the survey. The Participants agreed that the most common competencies that needed by the Target Group was:
/ Planning and Management
/ Working with others
/ Valuing Ideas
/ Vision
In addition, the participants indicated that it would be very useful if the CCI Professionals could also have skills on:
/ Knowledge and familiarisation with Digital Skills
/ Networking Abilities
/ Problem Solving Abilities
As a result, the 12 most important Skills and Competencies that the CreatEU Project – Skills Framework consists of, as they were identified from the participants and the Activities during the IO1 Research Survey, is as follows:
EntreComp Framework Skills
- Creativity
- Motivation and perseverance
- Learning through experience
- Vision
- Working with others
- Taking the initiative
- Valuing ideas
- Planning & management
- Spotting opportunities
- Mobilizing resources
Additional Skills
- Digital and New Technologies Knowledge
- Networking Ability