CreativeStack an Innovation Infrastructure - White Paper #SDECE26

CreativeStack an Innovation Infrastructure - White Paper #SDECE26 | Zenodo Skip to main Communities My dashboard Log in Sign up Zenodo is currently experiencing slowness and intermittent outages due to heavy automated traffic from bots and AI crawlers. We are aware of the problem, and our team is focused on stabilizing the service. Thank you for your patience. Published May 2, 2026 | Version v1 Report Open CreativeStack an Innovation Infrastructure - White Paper #SDECE26 Authors/Creators Trautenberger, Gerin 1 Show affiliations 1.

CreativeFED Description urope's Cultural and Creative Industries are not a sector in need of protection. They are innovation infrastructure in need of recognition . That is the argument this White Paper makes – across five domains, from five different angles, with one conclusion: the structural exclusion of CCIs from Europe's funding architecture, digital sovereignty agenda, and public procurement systems is not a cultural problem. It is a strategic error . The digital sovereignty framework is incomplete. The EuroStack initiative represents a serious and overdue European response to dependency on non-European digital infrastructure. This paper welcomes its ambition and advances one consequential correction : EuroStack, in its current form, omits the content layer – the films, music, games, journalism, and symbolic goods through which European citizens actually experience the digital and especially promoted European values. CCIs contribute 4.4% of EU GDP, employ over twelve million people, and generate the training data on which European AI systems are being built – without consent, without compensation, and without a governance voice. CreativeStack proposes a fifth layer: Creative Innovation Infrastructure. Europe cannot claim digital sovereignty while outsourcing its cultural content. The infrastructure is being built. The content must be European. The creators must have a voice. Artificial intelligence is already inside the studio – and policy has not kept pace. AI is not arriving at the creative sector's door. It is already reshaping how music is composed, how stories are told, how images are made, and how the next generation of practitioners will learn their craft. The Creativity–AI Nexus framework maps three distinct modes of human–AI creative interaction – deductive, inductive, and abductive – each with distinct implications for authorship, attribution, and labour. The legal landscape is moving: the European Parliament's March 2026 copyright resolution, the GEMA v. OpenAI ruling, and the AI Act's GPAI provisions represent genuine steps. They are not enough. Opt-out mechanisms remain inaccessible to individual creators. Transparency obligations remain formulaic. Entry-level creative roles – where craft is transmitted to the next generation – are being absorbed by AI at the same moment that the sector faces its deepest skills transition. The response must be systemic. Public procurement is a strategic instrument that Europe has not yet used. European public authorities spend approximately €85 billion annually. That spending power can activate creative methodologies – service design, co-creation, systems thinking – to address the complex, human-centred challenges that off-the-shelf procurement cannot solve. The legal space to do this already exists within European and national procurement frameworks. What is missing is the willingness to pioneer within the rules, and the institutional capacity to do so. Procurement can also enforce fair pay and fair practice, providing the sustainable revenue streams that the creative sector's precarious project economy cannot generate alone. The funding architecture is structurally exclusionary – and about to become worse. Four EU programmes dominate the landscape most relevant to CCIs: Horizon Europe, Creative Europe, CERV, and Erasmus+. Each operates on a distinct logic. None adequately captures how creative enterprises actually work, innovate, or generate value. The sector simultaneously embodies all four programme rationales and fits none of them completely enough to access any in full. The administrative cost of participation – estimated at approximately €40,000 per consortium proposal – functions as a tax on ambition that large institutions absorb and micro-enterprises cannot. The 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework threatens to deepen this exclusion: Horizon's Cluster 2 has been eliminated, the European Competitiveness Fund contains no cultural dimension, and CCIs appear in the new Horizon regulation in precisely one subordinate clause. At the moment when creative intelligence is most strategically important to AI development, democratic communication, and sustainable transition, European policy is proposing to defund the sector most capable of providing it. The response requires structural redesign, not marginal adjustment. This paper sets out twenty-eight recommendations across its five chapters. Their common logic is this: CCIs must be formally classified as Critical Innovation Infrastructure, with the funding eligibility, governance representation, and policy recognition that designation entails. The EIT/KIC model's failure offers a lesson and a seed: the Knowledge Triangle convergence it achieved in the creative sector for the first time must be carried forward in a new, regionally embedded institutional form – the LocKIC, anchored in the NRPP framework and designed for structural sustainability rather than programme dependency. National and Regional Partnership Plans offer the first genuine opening in a decade to embed creative investment as horizontal infrastructure at regional level. That window is open now. It will not remain so once plans are finalised and allocations locked. A Europe that funds technological innovation while defunding cultural intelligence is building for a future it will not be able to narrate, understand, or shape. CreativeFED presents this paper not as a final position but as an invitation – to the dialogue that begins today in Brussels, and to the policy process that must follow. 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Versions External resources Indexed in OpenAIRE Communities Details DOI DOI Badge DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19973794 Markdown [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19973794) reStructuredText .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19973794.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19973794 HTML <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19973794"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19973794.svg" alt="DOI"></a> Image URL https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19973794.svg Target URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19973794 Resource type Report Publisher Zenodo Conference Strategic Dialogue for the European Creative Economy 2026 (#SDECE26) , AT60, Av. de Cortenbergh 60, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium, 5th May 2026 Rights License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. Read more Copyright CreativeFED, Gerin Trautenberger, Gerbrand Bas Citation Export Technical metadata Created May 3, 2026 Modified May 3, 2026 Jump up About About Policies Infrastructure Principles Projects Roadmap Contact Blog Blog Support Help FAQ Developers REST API OAI-PMH Contribute GitHub Donate Funded by Powered by CERN Data Centre & InvenioRDM Status Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms of Use This site uses cookies. Find out more on how we use cookies Accept all cookies Accept only essential cookies

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