AI-Supported, Practice-Based Entrepreneurship for Innovation in Creative Startups

I am seeking partners to co-develop a Horizon Europe Cluster 2 proposal aligned with HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-HERITAGE-02: Boosting creative startups for disruptive innovation.

This project investigates how structured, evidence-based entrepreneurial approaches can enhance innovation, resilience, and competitiveness across Europe’s cultural and creative industries (CCIs). While CCIs are central to economic growth, cultural heritage, and social cohesion, creative decision-making is often driven by intuition, informal experience, and untested assumptions, limiting sustainability and scalability.

Drawing on advances in entrepreneurship research, the project applies hypothesis-driven development, iterative experimentation, and behavioural execution to creative practice. It adapts and evaluates three experimentally validated approaches:

• Milestone Mapping

• Structured Validation

• Proactive Implementation

Together, these provide a framework for analysing how creative professionals define success, test assumptions about audiences and markets, and sustain progress over uncertain development cycles across sectors including audiovisual, design, performing arts, and interactive media.

The project adopts a mixed-methods, practice-based research design, combining structured pilot interventions with creative professionals and cross-sector comparative analysis. A central component is the development of an AI-assisted system that:

• Captures key decision points in creative processes

• Surfaces underlying assumptions through structured questioning

• Tracks how these assumptions are tested, revised, or confirmed over time

This will generate comparable, FAIR datasets on creative decision-making, risk perception, and innovation pathways across sectors and national contexts. The project will work directly with ~50 creative startups, supporting real-world experimentation and aiming to contribute to the development of sustainable and successful creative ventures.

By analysing these patterns, the project advances understanding of how artistic practice, entrepreneurial reasoning, and AI-enabled technologies interact, contributing to more innovative, inclusive, and resilient creative ecosystems across Europe.

Looking for

• Coordinators or partners for Cluster 2 proposals (HERITAGE-02)

• Researchers in entrepreneurship, innovation, and behavioural science

• Experts in AI, data analysis, and decision-support systems

• Cultural and creative sector organisations (audiovisual, design, performing arts, media)

• Creative startups, incubators, and innovation hubs

• Partners interested in practice-based, experimental, and entrepreneurial approaches

Offering

• Expertise in practice-based and artistic research methodologies

• Strong interest in entrepreneurship-driven innovation in CCIs

• Experience in digital cultural heritage and creative technologies

• Skills in co-creation, pilot design, and stakeholder engagement

• Contribution to methodology development, experimentation frameworks, and impact design

• Experience in proposal development and consortium building, with interest in leading or contributing to relevant work packages