September 20th – CREATHRIV-EU project partners met online for the official launch of the activities. The acronym stands for Euroclusters for Thriving Creative and Cultural Industries, a project funded under the Joint Cluster Initiative call of the EU Single Market Programme that will last 24 months and is one of the 2 Euroclusters in the Creative and Cultural Industries ecosystem. CREATHRIV-EU is an ambitious initiative whose main objective is strengthening the European Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs) and bringing it back on the sustainable growth path after the Covid-19 pandemic. This objective entails a set of specific objectives and activities that will require an high engagement of SMEs: - Networking for resilience; - Triggering the green and digital transition of the CCIs; - Up-skillink and re-skilling of the CCIs’ workforce - Going global addressing the challenges and reaping the benefit of non-EU markets. During the first meeting, CREATHRIV-EU partners depicted their action plan to achieve this objective and start engaging the European CCIs community. It was underlined how important it will be the collaboration with other Euroclusters to achieve better and long-term results. CREATHRIV-EU is coordinated by Basilicata Creativa, the Basilicata regional cluster for Creative and Cultural Industries, that will partner with a well experienced and heterogeneous team, representing different EU regions, that is made up of:

• Baltic Film and Createch Cluster from Lithuania
• Innoskart Digital Cluster from Hungary
• Twist Cluster from Belgium
• Corallia Gi-Cluster from Greece.

The consortium is ready and full of motivation, despite the great deal of work required for the success of the project. “The next 24 months will be very challenging but very rich in opportunities for the partners to grow as clusters and for the whole CCIs to become more resilient, more digital and greener” – this was the main message of the meeting. CREATHRIV-EU representatives will attend the EU cluster conference in Prague where, together with all the other Euroclusters and Cluster Partnerships funded under Horizon 2020 and COSME Programme, will start sharing knowledge and experiences to pave the way for a stronger and more resilient economy EU. The capitalization of dialogues in the EU cluster conference is paramount for CREATHRIV-EU and this is the main reason why the consortium decided to schedule their first face-to-face meeting on the 18th of October. The city that will host the meeting is Matera, European Capital of Culture 2019, probably one of the best places to start building the future of the CCIs.