In today’s rapidly shifting world, the link between culture, creativity, and innovation is stronger than ever. Yet, the way innovation policies are typically designed often overlooks one crucial element: the power of creativity to shape how societies adapt, evolve, and imagine their futures.
This is where the ekip Knowledge Bank steps in. It is a new digital space built to help policymakers, cultural practitioners, and innovators work together differently.. It’s a living platform that connects ideas, people, and methods across Europe to make policy-making more experimental, inclusive, and responsive to real needs.
The Knowledge Bank is part of the ekip, broad European partnership that brings together cities, innovation labs, consultancies, universities, cities and creative organisations, and which of Creative Industry Košice is part, to test new ways of designing and implementing policy.
For CIKE, being part of ekip means extending the work we’ve long been doing in Košice, that is experimenting with new approaches to city development and policy design, fostering collaboration between creative professionals and policymakers, and using cultural insight to tackle complex urban challenges.
The ekip partnership has taken this spirit of experimentation across Europe. Through years of data gathering, research, surveys, and policy prototyping workshops led by Future by Lund and delivered by CIKE and other city partners, ekip has tested how creative methods can reshape innovation policies at local and national levels. The results, lessons, and tools from these experiments have now been distilled into one central, open-access platform: the ekip Knowledge Bank.
The Knowledge Bank serves as a go-to repository for cross-sector innovation knowledge. It’s designed for all interested parties in how creativity and policy can work hand in hand to build better innovation ecosystems. It features real-world case studies that demonstrate how cities and organizations have successfully implemented new innovation instruments and policy experiments. It offers in-depth analyses of existing mechanisms, ranging from EU funding schemes to local innovation programs, showing how these can be adapted specifically for the cultural and creative industries. Users also gain access to practical tools, templates, and methodologies designed to support the design, prototyping, and evaluation of innovation policies. Complementing these resources are insights and guidelines derived directly from pilot projects conducted across Europe, providing a rich foundation for learning and application.
Unlike traditional knowledge platforms that simply store documents, the ekip Knowledge Bank is interactive and applied. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, showing not just what innovation looks like, but how to make it happen.
The platform is open to a diverse community: policymakers, investors, researchers, cultural activists, innovation actors, and creative professionals.
Whether you’re designing public programs, managing a creative hub, or exploring new ways to fund experimentation, the Knowledge Bank gives you access to tested models and evidence from across Europe. It’s a resource that helps connect sectors that don’t always speak the same language: public institutions and artists, designers and urban planners, economists and curators, and helps them collaborate more effectively.
At its core, the Knowledge Bank exists to mobilise people around policy advocacy and to support the creation of thriving, resilient innovation ecosystems where creativity drives progress.
CIKE’s participation in ekip partnership reflects our long-standing belief that cities are laboratories for innovation and that culture is one of their most powerful engines.
Through policy prototyping workshops in Košice, Bratislava, Matera, Tallinn, Rotterdam, Lund, Stockholm, and Saint-Étienne, CIKE and its partners helped local actors test new models for cultural and innovation policies. These workshops combined research, co-creation, and policy design to see what happens when creative thinking meets real governance structures.
Our role was to translate these experiments into tangible knowledge, the kind that policymakers, cultural managers, and entrepreneurs can actually use. The Knowledge Bank is where this collective learning now lives, freely available to anyone who wants to build better, more creative systems of support.
The ekip Knowledge Bank is not a static archive. It’s a dynamic, expanding ecosystem of knowledge. As more partners, cities, and researchers contribute, it will continue to grow, evolve, and respond to emerging challenges in the cultural and innovation landscape.
At CIKE, we see it as a tool for empowerment, one that helps bridge local and European perspectives, connects creative practice with policy-making, and turns culture into a driver of innovation that truly serves communities.