Promoting entrepreneurship education to overcome local unemployment

Paolo Montemurro is the director of Materahub, project manager of EU funded projects since 2008. Since 2010, he has been working on capacity building actions for the Creative and Cultural sector and support to young entrepreneurs and startups in the cultural and social sector. He has worked on cross-fertilization between arts and other sector of economy, society and culture.

Paolo actively works on the topic of internationalization and networking at EU level for the Creative and Cultural sector. He is researching the model of European Capitals of Culture as labs to support CCIs development. Since 2016, he has been the person in charge of bringing Materahub in European networks among which the European Creative Business Network, Creative Business Cup Network, European Creative Hubs Network and recently EIT KIC Culture and Creativity.

Materahub aims to foster local development through entrepreneurship, innovation, networking, and cross-fertilization. How do you integrate these elements to create a cohesive strategy that benefits both the local community and the broader cultural and creative sectors?

When Materahub was created in 2011, Matera was a city looking for a vision for its future. Unesco World Heritage since 1993, a place for movies but no clear idea of how to valorize cultural heritage and the scattered creative and cultural scene, existing in the city and in the region but lacking of key skills for growth and the capacity to generate an ecosystem.

The candidature at European Capital of Culture was the right boost to think culture, creativity, arts as the key pillar for developing the city in a new path.

That was the right moment for us to intervene and build with them and for them capacity building initiatives covering key skills areas like entrepreneurship and economic sustainability, then with the time digital and green, but also understanding the power of culture to foster innovation in other sector where creativity was not an asset.

All these actions have always kept the community as an element on which to generate impact and with whom to cooperate to support the development of the future of the city.

In the first years it has been all about testing and practice, then the testing phase has left space to research, modeling and policy support as we understood our work needed a strong influence on the decision taken by policy makers involved directly or indirectly in the definition of key policies and programs for the creative and cultural sector.

The common line for all this process has been Europe and the possibility to cooperate since day one with other organisations doing something similar in other countries and in other European Capitals of Culture of the past, as it was with Kosice. In Europe we found the right environment for experimentation and for sharing what we had discovered, nourishing our practice with the work of other organizations.

Supporting creative and cultural operators to transform their projects into sustainable economic activities is a key focus for Materahub. How do you approach the challenge of balancing artistic vision with economic sustainability?

One of our first focus for us has been on promoting “entrepreneurship education”, initially as a mean to overcome local unemployment and especially youth unemployment but soon also focusing on creative and cultural sectors in the South of Italy and slowly all around Europe.

We knew well the sectors and we understood there was a big difference between cultural ones and creative ones, we knew it would have been a big failure approaching cultural organizations and professionals with a business or startup logic. But we also knew it was all a matter of finding the right words to describe concepts that were and still are shared between the cultural sectors and entrepreneurs.

So when we started to work on the entrepreneurial area of skills development for CCS, we understood it was needed a work of translation to make the artists and creative professionals aware that they are already in their daily work “entrepreneurial” even if they do not see themselves as entrepreneurs. The translation helped us to use models normally for startups like the business model canvas shaping their nature to fit better with the characteristics of the creative scene. That’s where our Creative Project Canvas was developed (https://www.creativeprojectcanvas.com/) and we started to organize several workshops, short and long programs to bring the sector closer to the entrepreneurial vision.

It was easier than planned and there was less resistence than expected even if we understood sometimes it is good for cultural professionals to simply leave to other members of their enlarged team things like planning and management.

In this scenario, once again, European Commission has been an incredible partner  of ours, ensuring resources and time to test and experiment, bringing our models immediately to the European dimension, involving other organisations in the testing and “translation” work.

Your work involves fostering innovation in education and implementing the EntreComp framework. How these initiatives have transformed educational practices and outcomes for participants in the creative and cultural industries?

We have been one of the first organization to use EntreComp “into Action” as a reference and framework for the design of new learning path focused on entrepreneurship education. We met the group of researchers who supported the EC JRC in developing the first version of the framework and then we have been an operational hand working to test into practice the theoretical assumptions of this group.

Easy to say one of the first area where we decided to test EntreComp has been the design and delivery of training for creative and cultural sectors and this has been another key element in the success of our programs. The framework helped us simplify the process of programs development and at the same time its transferability to other countries and other smaller or bigger communities of users in the CCIs.

We could ensure to the participants that by joining our programs they were receiving training shaped on a framework of competences recognized by a number of practitioners in Europe and launched originally by the European Commission itself.

This specific angle of our work made us also become one of the first members of the Pact for Skills for Creative Industries to join the working group on Entrepreneurship Education for CCIs and also the organization responsible for the group on Creative Entrepreneurship on the EntreComp platform hosting communities of practitioners of the framework.

Could you share some specific initiatives or programs that have had a significant impact, and what were the key factors in their success? What has been one of the most transformative outcomes from these activities, and how has it influenced the local creative ecosystem?

I am personally very much attached to the CultourIsCapital project. The project explored the potential cooperation of CCIs with tourism organization in European Capitals of Culture by proposing a new model of tourism to be respectful of local communities, innovative and transformative thanks to the role and involvement of CCIs and able to recognize the role of the two main sectors called into action during the period of ECoC bid, preparation, delivery and legacy. We have been able to engage CCIs in ECoCs while this is not always the case in such very culture and arts focused program following the example of those cities who invested a lot on CCIs for their potential role in the long term development of a creative driven economy, again the reference is to Kosice.

We developed a new web app mapping CCIs in ECoCs and offering to creatives the possibility to invite European tourists to discover their cities from the perspective of the creative scene and not just for the “usual” magnets of tourists like cultural heritage and food.

I personally like this project as it had a follow up reflecting on the role of data in shaping the strategy of tourism and community development in ECoC and again we asked CCIs to act as facilitators of the dialogue between tourist organisations and tech experts (data experts).

The importance of the project made the European Commission recognize it as a good practice in the Guide for Funding Culture initiatives https://culture.ec.europa.eu/funding/cultureu-funding-guide

You are the leading force behind GreenCCIrcle project that aims to empower the Cultural and Creative Industries to tackle climate change. What is your long-term vision for its impact on the CCIs?

With GreenCCIrcle we would like to activate a common reflection around the importance of embedding sustainability in the business models of creative and cultural sector as the current tendency is mostly related to the application of corrective measures to ongoing processes trying to make “green” approaches fit into existing processes of cultural production.

We want to make sure the green is one of the pillar of any new project or cultural business allowing CCIs to be not only aware of what they need in order to achieve such objective but also exploiting their capacity to support other economic sectors and the entire European society in the transition.

We firmly believe in the principles stated with the New European Bauhaus and the role of artists and cultural professional to make Europe a beautiful place based on equality, openness, accessibility.

The introduction of the Sustainability Facilitator role is a significant aspect of the project. How do you envision this role evolving over time, and what support will be provided to these facilitators to maximize their effectiveness in driving green transformation within CCIs?

There is a lot of talk around green transition for CCIs, several initiatives, a lot of funding opportunities. We see this as an incredible occasion to bring forward what we always considered one of the most important roles of cultural professionals their capacity to foster innovation, to generate impact, to disrupt sectors which are not fully or not at all linked to creativity. The sustainability facilitator will act as a promoter of green deal principles, green transition practices over society and economy as a whole, able to apply the creative processes and the sustainable thoughts and behaviours to business, technology, science, community.

For us this new profile in the CCIs will be able to generate new professional outcomes with increased expertise and specialization but also a recognized influence and leadership role in the wider CCIs community and within single organisazions, being able to lead cross-functional teams, guiding strategic planning and implementation of green initiatives. The facilitator will also be able to integrate the twin transition linking green with new technologies and digital tools, especially for monitoring impacts.

Not les important will also be the role in the networking area within the industry and over other sectors and its advocacy and educational role toward future generations of creative and culture professionals.

I am very happy we have an amazing partnership with us building this new profile and I am sure that by providing previously mentioned supports, green facilitators will be well-equipped to drive meaningful and lasting green transformations within the CCIs, ensuring that sustainability becomes an integral part of the industry’s future.

How do you see technology enhancing the management and dissemination of cultural heritage, and what future trends do you anticipate in this intersection of technology and culture?

We have reflected quite much on the topic of technology and its application in cultural heritage, especially on the way it could improve the experience of visitors and audience. We have worked closely with professionals in cultural heritage to design a new learning path for them connecting cultural heritage and creative industries through the EU-Heritage project funded by Erasmus + (https://www.euheritage.eu/). What we realized is that cultural heritage needs strong collaboration with other sectors in culture, with tourism and with communities in order to become an asset for economic development.

The most interesting approach we found, considering technologies, has been the base of an Horizon Europe project we have been part of, the ReinHerit project, whose pay off was “Make it Your Own” and who used the co-creation approach to test new ways technologies could be used in cultural heritage. The principle is that we do not need the latest technology, the most sophisticated one but we need the one which will be the right fit for the cultural heritage site, the professionals working in it and, most of all, the audience and visitors we expect to be experiencing cultural heritage.

This is probably how  European Cultural Heritage should be valorized as a resources for social, economic and cultural development of urban and inner areas.