Create. Transform. Regenerate. These were the themes of the third edition of Creative Skills Week (CSW) held last week in Prague. How might we shape creative ecosystems that are more adaptive, inclusive and sustainable? The future of education and skills for European Culture & Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI) was debated over five days of online and in-person presentations, panel discussions, keynotes, Q&A, and networking.
Hosted by Creative Prague and the imposing Kongresové Centrum Praha (formerly the Palace of Culture under the communist regime, as David Kaspar, Deputy Minister of Culture, informed us), CSW repeatedly returned to the broader role of creative skills in shaping our common good and democratic values. With the besieged capital of Ukraine a mere 10 hours’ drive from the conference hall, these remain urgent issues. As well as democratic challenges, technological acceleration was a recurring theme during the week with digital literacy and AI looming large in discussions, as well as the potential for micro-credentials to offer flexible pathways through formal and informal thickets of learning.
Creative Skills Week Opening Plenary Panel (L-R): Barbara Revelli (Head of Programmes, ELIA), David Kašpar, Deputy Minister of Culture (CZ), David Crombie, CYANOTYPES Project Coordinator, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, Catherine Mulligan, RISE and Visiting Academic, Imperial College London, Gerin Trautenberger, CreativeFED & EIT Culture & Creativity.
For me, one of the week’s many highlights involved introducing the participants at our panel discussion, The Future of Craft: From Tradition to Innovation. As Education Director at EIT Culture & Creativity with a lifelong connection to craft, it was a particular honour to convene a panel of leading voices in contemporary craft to examine how the field might develop over the coming years. Louise Allen (Creative Futures Academy) spoke of craft as an anchor point (in contrast to AI) connecting people and community, the human hand fashioning idea and concept into an artefact; Paolo Montemurro (Materahub) underscored the entrepreneurial potential of craft when linked to new business models and asked how might we ensure craft education is directly responsive to the evolving needs of the modern workforce; Georgios Mouftoglou (CUBE) presented MOSAIC as a centre for vocational excellence and a response to fragmentation of skills and lack of resources through digital upskilling; Laura Miguel Baumann (European Crafts Alliance) presented the ECA’s Craft Manifesto and highlighted the need for policy coherence across Europe’s fragmented craft landscape; Marianne Ping Huang (Aarhus University) described building resilient societies through reconnecting craft to cultural heritage in the project CRAFT IT 4SD.
Collectively, the panel illustrated both the opportunities and vulnerabilities of the craft sector. Craft is experiencing renewed interest: consumers increasingly seek authenticity, sustainability, and the handmade. Craft is tied to cultural tourism, luxury markets, and the experience economy; the European market for crafts is valued at over €80 billion, with strong projected growth. Craft also teaches us how to integrate knowledge across disciplines. It exemplifies how creativity can fuse methods, materials, and mindsets to produce forms of knowledge that are at once local and global, sensory and experimental. Working with their hands, craftspeople model a practice where sustainability, digitalisation, and entrepreneurial imagination are not separate but synthesised through skill and experience to create fusions of many practices. Here the central role of care and discipline in craft may provide us with a model for an ethical relation to our resources.
Solène Moutier, Education Programme Manager at EIT Culture & Creativity in Learning by Doing: Building Futures workshop.
When we discuss revitalizing and future-proofing a transition to innovative technologies and sustainable development, there is an implicit acknowledgement of damage (through terms such as repair, reconnect, resilience), combined with the impulse to refresh, innovate, future-proof, restore and invest – all aspects of the conference theme of regeneration. Slow movements, mindfulness, and degrowth all speak to this tension, but what (we wondered) might be a positive (ecologically beneficial, inclusive, societally desirable) conception of growth?
It is a crucial question at a time when the sector faces critical challenges. Training provision is uneven; younger generations are not always attracted to professions perceived as precarious; and many artisans struggle with marketing and monetising their work. Without intervention, traditional knowledge risks being lost. Here a common theme emerges, linking craft to other panels and plenaries where the need for creative confidence in our sector was emphasised. Creative confidence is more than individual talent: it is the conviction that creativity can transform not only materials and practices, but societies, economies, and democracies.
Rolf Hughes, EIT Culture & Creativity (with Isabelle Vérilhac, BEDA). offering forward-looking remarks on the evolving landscape of skills in the cultural and creative sectors at Closing Plenary.
Towards this end, EIT Culture & Creativity is preparing the ground for a European Craft Academy, which will equip artisans with entrepreneurial and digital skills, develop circular and climate-conscious practices, promote collaboration across sectors such as cultural heritage and health, and set a benchmark for excellence in training to consolidate Europe’s fragmented craft market while enabling interdisciplinary innovation. It is envisaged not just as an educational initiative for crafts practitioners, but a place where makers, students, entrepreneurs, and researchers can learn, unlearn, and relearn together, underpinning the idea that creativity is less a sectoral skill, than a form of agency, involving our collective capacity to adapt, to repair, and to regenerate. In craft we see this embodied: hands shaping material, tradition evolving through innovation, imagination meeting resistance.
Creative skills (or “transversal competencies”, as David Crombie from CYANOTYPES proposed as an alternative term) are not exclusive to one Knowledge Innovation Community at EIT. They are vital to help us survive, renegotiate, and grow stronger. If we invest in our collective creative confidence, recognising creativity as a fusion method bridging disciplines, then we can build ecosystems that are not only competitive but humane, not only innovative but resilient.
Author: Dr. Rolf Hughes, Education Director
EIT Culture & Creativity
Creative Skills Week 2025 is co-organised with EIT Culture & Creativity, the Creative Pact for Skills, SACCORD (Erasmus+ Forward-Looking Project Scheme co-funded by the European Commission Erasmus+ Programme), and CYANOTYPES (Alliances for Sectoral Cooperation on Skills co-funded by the European Commission Erasmus+ Programme).
📸:Štěpán Filip
