Innovative research on the European cultural heritage and the cultural and creative industries (2023/24)

Europe’s rich cultural heritage and strong creative tradition not only reflect our past, but also shape our future. It is by building on this foundation and developing our strengths that we can face the great challenges of our time with confidence, and shape a future based on European values and the respect of human rights. Europe's cultural heritage is well alive because it is the result of the interaction between people and their environment, and above all of the collective effort of EU citizens, who all have the same entitlement to enjoy their human and in particular cultural rights.[[CETS 199 - Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (coe.int)]]

Convinced that cultural heritage and the cultural and creative industries are an important part of the "social" dimension of democracy and sustainability, the Horizon Europe calls under this destination invite suggestions for policies and practices to address, at all levels of action, current challenges and provide innovative responses. Europe’s wealth of monuments and sites and its creative diversity of traditions, crafts, arts, architecture, literature, languages, theatre, films, games and music is a unique asset. It enriches our lives, fosters social and cultural cohesion and contributes to a sense of belonging. It also underpins an economy generating more employment than the automotive industry and a similar trade balance as food, drinks and tobacco combined. Many of Europe’s multinationals build their international success on the European heritage and creativity. At the same time, the sector is nurturing large numbers of dynamic small and micro enterprises, creating employment not the least for young people and women, while deploying their creativity not only to generate income but also to contribute to social and cultural sustainability, well-being and projecting European values at home and abroad.

This destination adopts a people-centred perspective and places cultural heritage and the cultural and creative industries at the very heart of the European economy and its sustainable development. European R&I activities under this destination will support and strengthen European cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries essentially under three areas:

Green: Europe’s cultural heritage and its cultural and creative industries need to share their responsibilities for adapting to the consequences of climate change, and mobilise their resources to support European citizens and societies for an inclusive, socially and culturally sustainable climate transition. A participatory approach to European cultural heritage and digital transformations in the preservation of tangible and intangible heritage will guide new endeavours.

R&I actions will focus on, for example, supporting the cultural and creative industries to turn the challenges of the climate transition into opportunities, and become drivers of an inclusive societal transition. R&I actions will foment the development of new environmentally friendly technologies and methods to manage, restore and preserve cultural heritage, with a view to making Europe a world leader in sustainable management of cultural heritage. R&I will also strengthen our capacity to manage anthropogenic threats. Support to the New European Bauhaus initiative is part of this area, integrating the core New European Bauhaus values of sustainability, inclusion and aesthetics.

Digital: The digital transition promises enormous opportunities for Europe’s cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries, but also serious challenges. It is important to ensure that, through the digitisation, EU citizens benefit from cultural heritage and be enabled to contribute to its enrichment. Digitisation should also provide new training opportunities on creative industries for young citizens in less populated areas.

R&I actions will focus on, for example, innovative approaches to empower the cultural and creative industries, including its many micro enterprises, to reap the benefits of using digital technologies, creating more appealing and valuable products, services and experiences for its users. R&I actions will deepen our knowledge on what, how and why digitised and digital cultural heritage may be exploited, reaping the benefits while avoiding the many pitfalls, and creating societal value. Collaborative platforms for cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries will be supported. A dedicated call, namely HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01, will support the establishment of a digital European cultural heritage collaborative space, including a cloud platform for European cultural heritage institutions. Such platforms will strengthen the collaboration and co-creation among cultural heritage institutions and with other stakeholders in the cultural heritage domain, widen access for citizens and strengthen research. Please consider below some key characteristics and specific conditions of the call. Also, cooperation between different actors within the cultural and creative industries and between the CCIs and other economic sectors and industries will be strengthened, creating new market opportunities for CCI stakeholders.

Innovative: To an ever greater degree, creative and cultural aspects drive socio-ecological innovation, participatory democratic processes and economic growth. Successful new digital and physical products and services need to be appealing and attractive, adapted to cultural particularities. Similarly, societal transformations such as the green and digital transitions depend on behavioural changes, which are largely based on changes in lifestyle, culture and perceptions. In such processes, the human is at the centre, and cultural heritage, the arts and the cultural and creative industries are key.

R&I actions will cover a variety of subjects, such as strengthening the innovation capacity of the cultural and creative industries, and their capability to act as innovation engines. Actions will focus both on cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries holistically, as an innovation ecosystem, and on specific CCI sectors such as music, filmmaking and video games. Actions will also foment innovation in cultural tourism, as well as explore innovative connections between cultural expressions and democracy and politics. Actions will also support the development of new innovative technologies and methods to restore, preserve and manage cultural heritage, as well as re-inforce the role of Europe’s cultural heritage in promoting European values among EU citizens and abroad.

The innovation ecosystems created and nurtured by the Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), in particular the KIC “EIT Culture and Creativity”, may contribute to innovation actions under this destination, and should as appropriate be considered.

In line with the Commission priorities, R&I actions under this Destination will help promote the European way of life, contribute to achieving the Green Deal goals and support an economy that works for people. They will contribute to the New European Bauhaus[[The New European Bauhaus initiative was launched by European Commission President von der Leyen in her State of the European Union speech autumn 2020. More information here: https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/index_en]] initiative, to reaching the UN Sustainable Development Goals and to building a stronger, more participatory and crisis-resilient society and economy. They will support the realisation of the full potential of cultural heritage, arts and cultural and creative industries as drivers of sustainable innovation and a European sense of belonging.

The topics under the call HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01 aim at supporting the establishment of a digital European cultural heritage collaborative space, including a cloud platform, and contribute to the vision and objectives of the Commission[[Recommendation (EU) 2021/1970 of 10 Nov 2021 on a common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage.]]. For the purpose of this call, the collaborative space will be referred to as the “European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage” (ECCCH).

An ex-ante impact assessment for the ECCCH was carried out between December 2021 and March 2022 by eight renowned independent experts contracted by the Commission[[European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Brunet, P., De Luca, L., Hyvönen, E., et al., Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage : ex – ante impact assessment, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/64014]]. This ex-ante impact assessment examined and described the needs of a digital European cultural heritage collaborative space from the perspective of the foreseen users (cultural heritage institutions, researchers, cultural and creative industries, etc.) and of European societies, thoroughly reviewed existing initiatives that might satisfy parts of these needs, and outlined the most important aspects to consider in implementing such a collaborative space.

The conclusion of the ex-ante impact assessment is that the ECCCH is highly important to Europe’s cultural heritage institutions and to European societies. In order to address the urgent evolving needs of Europe’s cultural heritage sector in the digital age for specifically adapted collaborative spaces, the European Union will ramp up its investments through the ECCCH, and also the common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage (the Data Space)[[See further https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/staff-working-document-data-spaces]] funded under the Digital Europe programme. The topics under this call are based on the conclusions and recommendations of the experts’ ex-ante impact assessment.

Some key characteristics of the vision for the ECCCH include:

• The ECCCH will be addressed to professionals[[In the context of this call, ‘professionals’ should be understood as the wide and interdisciplinary group of people working with cultural heritage in a professional or semi-professional way, researchers as well as people working with related activities such as within the cultural and creative industries.]]. It will enable an unprecedented level of lasting collaboration, synergy and co-creation between public and private players that will generate new realms of research, knowledge and creation of societal value.
• The basic ECCCH platform will provide easy to use tools for the most important needs.
• Active user communities that contribute to training and support, as well as common data models, guidelines and libraries for developing tools (including support for Graphical User interfaces (GUI) and visualisation), will ensure that also less well-equipped institutions will draw the full benefit of the ECCCH.
• To enhance collaboration and co-creation, IPR rights of the digital objects stored in the ECCCH and produced by ECCCH-based collaboration will be fully recorded and traceable. Guidelines for the use of IPR rights, such as rights statements provided by RightsStatements.org should be used where appropriate. This will enable new business models in the intersection between cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries.
• The long-term sustainability of data and data formats is one of the underlying principles of the ECCCH. The ECCCH will tackle these challenges through its architecture and basic functionalities. The design and architecture of the ECCCH is based on three principles:
  • digital twins of heritage objects,
  • digital continuum, tracing all interactions with heritage objects and related data objects,
  • digital ecosystem, open to all stakeholders, professions and activities to interact with each other and with the digital heritage objects, ultimately leading towards a new generation of multidimensional, interconnected and knowledge-enhanced heritage data forming digital commons, where the ECCCH will play a key role.
• The architecture of the ECCCH will ensure an evolutionary design, which will allow the adaption and incorporation of new technologies and tools and to fulfil new user requirements, while discontinuing less used tools.
• An open Application Programming Interface will allow new functionality to be developed and incorporated in the ECCCH by different initiatives, and encourage interoperability.
• The ECCCH will be open and inclusive, both in terms of the users of the platform and the connections to other related initiatives/platforms such as the Data Space.
• The ECCCH should build on the wealth of existing knowledge, technologies and work processes in Europe. It should draw on previous experience and best practice. The ECCCH and the Data Space should complement each other towards the common vision.
• The ECCCH should ensure, through its Governance body, the engagement of a wide range of appropriate representatives from Member States and Associated Countries, as well as from related EU initiatives.

The ECCCH will thus be a genuine collaboration platform, which brings together a wide array of professions, researchers and technologies for museums and other cultural heritage institutions. It will include and develop interactive tools for research, curation, restoration, preservation and for reaching out to citizens and cultural and creative industries, properly protect and manage IPR and allow commercial as well as non-commercial collaboration with a wide range of players.

All topics under this call are subject to the following conditions:

• All software developed should be open source, licensed under a CC0 public domain dedication or under an open source license as recommended by the Free Software Foundation[[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#SoftwareLicenses]] and the Open Source Initiative[[https://opensource.org/licenses]].
• If the use of fully open source software would require disproportional efforts or significantly diminish the quality or performance of the software, and if suitable non open source function libraries exists, such libraries may be used provided that a full user license free of charge for an unlimited period of time is granted to the consortium responsible for the ECCCH as well as to all users of the ECCCH.
• All software and other related deliverables should be compliant with the data model and the software development guidelines elaborated by the project funded under topic ‘HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01’.

All projects funded should participate in concertation activities with the project funded under topic ‘HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01’

Expected impacts:

Proposals for topics under this Destination should set out a credible pathway to contributing to the following expected impact of the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan:

• The full potential of cultural heritage, arts and cultural and creative sectors as a driver of sustainable innovation and a European sense of belonging is realised through a continuous engagement with society, citizens and economic sectors as well as through better protection, restoration and promotion of cultural heritage.

Legal entities established in China are not eligible to participate in Innovation Actions in any capacity. Please refer to the Annex B of the General Annexes of this Work Programme for further details.