Creating together
Innovation incubator #3
From a innovation incubator to the emergence of transformative changes in the creative sector. The hybrid Review Knowledge Sharing session of Collab4HySustCCI February 27 and 28, 2025 is a successful wrap. Photos by: Voula Androni
The Collab Innovation Pilots growing stronger & Collab for CCI Innovation international exchange, KSS5 in (Greece) program involved:
- 15 pilots presenting their process, the ambition and the indicators of success in the results to the intimate group of peers and, on day 2, in a pitch session.
- Mentors and mentees reviewing the SEE innovation incubator support and its design using in-depth, interactive and structured feedback.
- Feedback from the project participants and other international guests has been collected and shared individually to each pilot team.
Collab4HySustCCI has been positively reviewed for its strength and relevance as this 1st project offered direct innovation support to CCIs in Southeast Europe. Valued highly is its rather open and flexible format, integrating innovation in a real need. The regional focus on collaboration and the value of interaction has been gaining traction and hybridity remains effective. Two of the most discussed aspects were in-person meetings as well as the tailored mentoring process, both of these offers were deemed essential and beyond doubt valuable.
Learn more about this project at the Cross Con - The international Cross Innovation Conference 2025 in Sweden hosted by Subtopia on March 27,2025.
Collaborative Innovation for Hybrid and Sustainability Uptake in Cultural and Creative Industries - supports 15 initiatives selected in an open call. They integrate an innovation in either of 2 need areas: audience engagement in hybrid approaches or cross-sectoral collaboration. This project is fostering collaboration in the region of SoutheastEurope via: guidance, expert mentor support, and a microgrant to undertake incubation-based prototyping. The partners are Materahub from IT, Intercultura Consult BG, Syn+Ergasia GR , Det Flyvende Teater DK, and Nova Iskra RS. Collab 4 Hy Sust CCI is a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the EU and the National Culture Fund, Bulgaria and supported by the Municipality of Plovdiv.
Creative ecosystem Research
"Humans at play: Creators and Users"
The project "Humans at play: Creators and Users" of Intercultura Consult was implemented with the support of the National Culture Fund and over 20 partners representing the business, educational and cultural sectors.
The study was designed to cover the viewpoints and disposition of diverse key stakeholders in the creative ecosystem – players, creators and other creatives, educators, support organisations …
Publications in Bulgarian can be requested here, articles in English can be found here.
Competences and micro-credential
Intercultura Consult is an associate partner in the project Gamebadges - Skill Mapping and Micro-credentials for the Game Industry 2024 2026. The lead partner in the project is Metropolia UAS - Finland. The project is co-financed by the Erasmus+ program of the EU.
Milena Berbenkova participated in Game Dev Day 2 in Sofia 2024 where Intercultura presented the competency map developed in the Gamebadges project as well as opportunities for Bulgarian participants to acquire skills.
Publications in Bulgarian can be requested here, articles in English can be found here.
Training
creatives and culture professionals
In 2023, we held two trainings on the topic of "Vitality" for cultural and creative organizations in March in Sofia and in August in Plovdiv. In total 33 participants from across the country received training by 7 international and local experts on key topic areas and discovered new business models.
For all organizations, artists, and businesses from the creative ecosystem who wish to develop their organisation in terms of partnerships and connection with audiences, we have prepared three training videos in Bulgarian. View them.
European stories
Alliance for community cultural heritage tours
In celebration of the European Day of Languages in 2023, the European Language Label was awarded to Le LABA in France (leader) and partnering organizations from Bulgaria, Ireland, Italy and Romania for the Knowledge Alliance project European Stories /"Истории от Европа" 2019-2022
It was during the Covid pandemic, that , this international project, encouraged the cultural and creative professionals and tourism industry professionals to pave a route in the uncharted terrain of local, vernacular, community-based tourism strategies. ICC engaged in field research, mapping existing organizations and new initiatives, mapping skills needs and new business models. Intercutlura was in charge of design, testing, and delivery of the first training course for story-based cultural heritage mediators in Bulgaria. The guide for designing a local tour in English can be found here.
Incubators 1 & 2
Micro-incubators Time Perspectives (2021 – 2022) and Reconnect (2020 – 2021)
These two micro-incubators led and designed by the ICC team focused on supporting innovative cultural offers through cross-sectoral collaboration, and on supporting innovative digital cultural offers via targeted creative collaboration. Inhouse research had already pointed that cultural Leadership can be community generated and new opportunties guide this in the digital age deliver (Cherrington&Koleva 2019). Intercultura consult initiated micro-icubators as a platfom to pilot incubation for innovation intervention even prior the Covid pandemic. Both incubators were based on tailored methods for experimentation, expertise matching, guidance/mentorship, monitoring, assessment of impactand communication of results to very diverse groups in the museum sector, the cultural centres and communities as well as academic audiences.
"Time Perspectives: Long-Term Benefits of the Culture - Audience Relationship" incubatorwas directed at improving the audience interaction of cultural organisations.
It involved two museums and two cultural community centres, working in smaller settlements in Bulgaria - the NATURAL SCIENCE MUSEUM village of Cherni Osam ; the community centre in the village of Kostenec „PROSVETA- 1881“; the community centre „ELIN PELIN 1896“ in the town Elin Pelin and the "HOUSE OF HUMOUR AND SATIRE" Gabrovo. In the incubator the organisations benefited from a small innovation grant to engage external artists, experts and partners from the touristic sector and offering guidenlines on to improve their existing cultural offers, or create new ones. (PDF)
The ”Reconnect: Audiences and Cultural Content in the Digital Environment” incubator addressed audiences for diverse cultural offers in the digital environment.
Partners in this project were three free arts scene organisations: the puppet theatre company 'Male Male' piloting new forms of virtual/on-site audience engagement; '36 monkeys' with a science theatre/museum audience pilot; 'Meeting points' who experimented with self-guided 'spice tour' app in their multicutural city offers.
The project provided valuable research insight of audiences attitudes (BG in PDF), capacity building activities on reaching and sustaining audiences in the digital environment for cultural organizations, and micro-funding for experimentation with new digital content to three creative organizations. A large scale national scope survey of several target audience groups delivered results of vital importance to the CCI sector for years to come. Find here the publication here Reconnect: Cultural Content and Audiences in the Digital Environment (Koleva&Berbenkova 2021Culture Society Economy Politics 1(2):12-31)
Upskilling creative business modelling
The “Cultural development is the source for prosperity of community” project offered a bilingual capacity development for Ukrainian and Georgian cultural managers (visual arts, community arts, heritage, festival managers) in 2013. The lead Ukraining partner came from Donetsk and was the city youth centre of arts “EkoArt”. By 2025 many of the colleagues from Ukraine have been internally displaced or moved to other EU countries, however, the insights have stayed. Cultural managers, professionals and artsits and 30 Bulgarian counterparts engaged in intensive training programme involving 3 cities in Bulgaria: Sofia, Kostenets, including the Old City of Plovdiv heritage and tourism development strategy , already preparing to become European Capital of Culture in 2019 together with Matera, Italy. The programme stressed the changing economic and social contexts through a two-way transfer of experiences with professionals from the public, civic and private sector of cultural activities in Bulgaria. Articles in English can be found here.