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In recent years, there has been increased attention toward art-science collaborations. Such collaborations encompass a broad spectrum of activities, ranging from artistic projects informed by technology and scientific research and vice versa, to novel forms of inquiry and communication at the intersection of the arts and sciences, combining diverse forms of knowledge and imagination. While such collaborations are not necessarily new, their recent manifestations allow us to gain insights into how complex societal challenges might be approached through multi-actor and disciplinary partnership

The understanding of resilience, and how the ability to respond or adjust to new situations can be implemented and evaluated, gained prominence in public policy. This study examines how European Union (EU) member states plan to support cultural and creative sectors (CCSs) within the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) of the NextGenerationEU Program and how they plan the CCSs to contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Using mixed methods, it is found that the understanding of how structural deficiencies in CCSs can be addressed is not systematic and not all countries invest to make the cultural infrastructure more future-proof. Neither the budgets nor the mode of resilience (absorption, adaptation, and transformation) exposed in the plans consistently correlates with how countries intend to address key impact pillars. Countries with larger CCSs are more prone to transformation. The theoretical contribution lies in the elaboration of the concept of “ex ante resilience.”

Do women and workers with a migration background earn relatively less in the core creative arts or in commercial creative sectors such as advertising? In this paper, we seek to (1) uncover to what extent workers’ socio-demographic characteristics and the sub-sector of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in which they are active affect how much they earn, and (2) unravel to what extent the context of sub-sectors affects inequality in earnings between different socio-demographic groups. Using Statistics Netherlands register data on all workers with earnings from the CCIs, we show that earnings are lowest in the sub-sectors in Throsby’s (2008) inner circles of the CCIs. Both having a migration background and being a woman affect earnings in the CCIs. Especially gender inequality in earnings is extensive and omnipresent, being least pronounced in sub-sectors such as literature, music and visual arts, and most severe in e.g. film and photography.

Despite its ubiquity in arts and culture, crowdfunding has limitedly been instrumentalized in policy settings. Yet, with joint contributions by friends, fans, governments, and quasi-public institutions, match-funding of arts and culture through crowdfunding platforms may have benefits: increased revenues for makers and cultural fields, transparency in funding allocation, and stronger community engagement. Drawing upon interviews with regional and local match-funding entities in the Netherlands, we explain how and why they engage in match-funding and what is needed for the collaborative funding mechanism to thrive. Funders are attracted by match-funding’s potential to support relatively large numbers of hitherto underserved makers with relatively small amounts of money, complementary to other funding instruments. Aspects largely overlooked are match-funding’s capacity to leverage resources and install co-decisive processes of public funding allocation. Situated at the juncture of funding, policy, and technology, match-funding requires learning and experimentation with other than reward-based formats to unleash its democratizing potential.

In India, characterised by extreme income disparity and high levels of precarious and informal labour, social entrepreneurship could challenge the status quo by improving existing systems with creative solutions. The present chapter discusses the case of the innovative venture ‘Chamar Studio’. It demonstrates how a social entrepreneur, by rehabilitating the traditional skills of leatherworkers, succeeds in enhancing labour conditions and re-claiming the identity of a low-caste community in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum. Working with leather is traditionally associated with the Chamar community and by the higher castes considered impure. Moreover, the notion ‘Chamar’ and their identity as leatherworkers have long lastingly been used against a large group of people, which perpetuates the discrimination prevalent within the Indian caste system. Instead of disassociating from the traditional caste-based occupations and social stigma, with his ‘Chamar Studio’, Sudheer Rajbhar deploys the skills of leatherworkers to design and manufacture bags from recyclable rubber tyres. As a social entrepreneur, Sudheer improves the working conditions of the artisans; he also leverages the skills of manual workers into a craft; he provides a sustainable alternative for a scarce resource (leather); and he challenges severe social stereotypes. We expose why Sudheer’s innovative, social entrepreneurship can be considered to be jugaad, or: frugal, flexible, and inclusive.

Even if crises have the capacity to reveal the structural problems that underlie the various components of social systems, little systematic knowledge exists on how museums respond to these situations. Combining what is known about how museums reacted to previous crisis and empirical evidence of how museums recently adjusted their activities and strategies, the article highlights how art museums in Western Europe started to tackle the ambivalent challenge to pursue social purposes while being urged to monetize possible assets. During the COVID-19 pandemic, art museums have adopted ‘emergency’ and ‘emerging’ strategies associated with the modification of the funding mix, new partnerships and collaborations, and sustainable financing. The offer of digital services, a moderate reliance on crowdfunding, blockchain technologies, and an increased sensitivity of community needs, are among the novelties that art museums engaged with. Forerunners that had started with such practices before the pandemic, had the opportunity to take these to the next level.

Values such as circularity, local production, and the use of more environmental-friendly materials have started to reshape various domestic industries. Because of the social and environmental challenges that the Textile & Clothing industry faces, solutions proper to slow fashion practices are gaining importance. The present chapter presents a case study of a local production network that roots in the maker movement and experiments with various aspects of circular practices, to develop new material: the Tomato Textile project. Based on ethnography and action research methods, the challenges of entrepreneurial practices in eco-innovation are identified and discussed.

This magazine describes the journey of a course at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. ‘Assessing the impact of culture and creativity in society’ was piloted in 2021, as a collaboration between the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication and Impact Centre Erasmus. Ellen Loots and Marjelle Vermeulen have been the driving forces behind the course and this magazine, which were co-created with students and cultural organizations as key stakeholders.

This Special Issue seeks to address the perennial question of support options for the cultural and creative industries (exacerbated due to the impact of COVID-19) by bringing together articles that examine and explain various dynamics in CCI financing and funding. The articles in the Issue are diverse in their approaches, methods and data. They range from conceptual, qualitative, and case studies, to analyses based on survey data and granular ‘big data’. The articles mainly address digital fundraising technologies and investment practices. Strikingly absent in this collection of studies are modes of funding in which governments and public providers occupy center stage. Innovation in financing and funding appears to be more the result of new modalities (i.e., technology-driven) than of fundamental shifts in thoughts about how the cultural economy could be approached and how the CCI should be financially sustained. The articles in the Issue suggest the emergence of a new funding paradigm, which steps away from a clear demarcation between public and private in terms of interests and financing modes. This new paradigm embraces collaborative funding mechanisms such as crowdfunding, incubator and accelerator finance, and other pooled investments, as well as digital fundraising technologies that facilitate new modes of asset finance and tokenized funding. Future research themes are being suggested: the merging of project funding with structural budgets, the emergence of new business models and improved labor market conditions due to technology-driven aids, shifts in transaction costs, and issues related to regulation and legislation.

This conceptual paper focuses on understanding the interactions between art, science, and technology as a forms of wide interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary collaboration. There is scarce knowledge about how the wide interdisciplinary interaction between artists, scientists, and technologists can be conceptualized through a shared framework for collaboration. The ecology of collaboration involves a complex set of social structures varying between autonomous individually organized teams and institutional programmes. By using a social ecological approach, integrating social, organizational, and cultural factors, art, science, and technology (AST) collaborations can be characterized by a sequence of antecedent, process, and outcome conditions. These elements are organized to form a conceptual framework for art-science collaborations, elaborating on AST in its relationship to knowledge, aesthetics, interdependence, and experimentalism as antecedent conditions, while outlining the process elements and possible outcomes of the collaborations. The framework can be a vehicle for evaluation and reflection for practitioners, researchers, educators, and policymakers.

This magazine compiles the articles written by students of the Cultural Entrepreneurship Theory (CC4115) course based on their interviews with a crafts entrepreneur (2021-2022). The aim of the magazine is to serve as an accessible repository of cases of crafts entrepreneurship from all over the world.

Firm growth in creative industries, which are characterized by craftmanship, imagination, artistic quality and innovativeness, is a conundrum. By means of a matched pair case study design of market leaders and followers in seven creative industries in the Netherlands, the present paper seeks to tackle this conundrum. It suggests that for entrepreneurial firms to develop (instead of stagnating or demising), founders need to fit in, or understand the value creation and conversion processes in vigor within their industry. For firms to grow by means of an expansion of their markets, founders need to stand out, or create resource advantages vis a vis other firms in the industry, which could lie in an internationalization or a digitalization vantage. Not despite of, but because of their quality focus, which accrues to reputation advantages and impact, creative firms succeed in growing. Lessons are drawn from how and why firms in creative industries develop and grow. These may contribute to firm growth assessment practices and process theories.