Good practice:

CreaDemo, CreMa and DigiDemo: flexible funding for CCI focused development projects

CreaDemo, CreMa and DigiDemo are a set of funding funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland and transferred to the Promotion Center for Audiovisual Culture (AVEK) for implementation. CreaDemo grants are intended for projects developing the creative industries and cultural entrepreneurship. Grants are awarded to companies, professionals, or organisations engaged in professional business with project development; projects seeking new products or service innovations for the creative industries (method, demo, pilot, prototype, or concept design) based on or utilising creative expertise. CreMa aims to launch multidisciplinary pilot projects in the creative industries and other industries and thus promote the creation of new products, services or operating models. CreMA is a flexible grant which is intended for merging together the expertise of creative and other fields and for developing cooperation and business models. The objective of funded projects is to make new products and services available on the market. From the perspective of company business development, the projects involve transferring know-how in the creative industries to other industries and vice versa. DigiDemo support is intended for product development of new audiovisual or other cultural content applicable for digital terminals (production of a demo, the pilot episode of a serial programme, or for concept planning).

(Amount of funding used in 2020 (sum confirmed annually): 500,000 € (CreaDemo and CreMA) + 720,000 € (DigiDemo). Funding by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland from the State budget lottery and pools proceeds allocated for art and culture promotion.

In the first application period of CreaDemo in 2012 funding was granted for 84 projects with 473,720 € and applied worth of 3,900,000 € in total. The amount of application for all has only risen during the years being at it's highest in early 2020. The funding has got appraise especially from entrepreneurs for it's agility and flexibility. In many of the granted projects the CCI and ICT collaboration is in the focus. Example: https://www.kopiosto.fi/en/AVEK/arilyn-opens-the-door-to-other-worlds/

The limited funding is very competed.

The general agility and flexibility of the funding from application to reporting which serves especially well SMEs with limited resources offers much to learn and is seen something that should be applied to many funding instruments. In terms of arts and ICT the funding, especially CreMa, encourages (and demands) for multidisciplinary collaboration where CCI and ICT naturally join forces on on practical level in development projects with tangible results. This also could be applied in wider sense.