What was the first motivation why WestBIC decided to join CreaSus?
Working with CreaSus aligns with WestBIC’s core offering of supporting entrepreneurs from concept to commercialization.
Our expertise in business model development, investor readiness, and scaling enterprises makes us ideally positioned to help cultural and creative industries integrate sustainability into their business strategies.
CreaSus complements our existing advisory services by providing specialised tools and frameworks that enable creative entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses.
From your experience, what are the current barriers and/or challenges for CCSIs to embed sustainability in their business models?
Through our engagement with creative enterprises, WestBIC has seen some key barriers preventing CCSI’s from embedding sustainability into their business models.
Financial constraints are always a concern, especially as some operate in the voluntary space, issues such as knowledge gaps and operational challenges are all relevant to CCSI’s.
However, we’re optimistic that through CreaSus creative enterprises can overcome these barriers and turn sustainability into a genuine competitive advantage.
How does sustainability innovation become a competitive advantage?
Sustainability innovation creates competitive advantage through multiple avenues such as:
- Cost Leadership – energy-efficient technologies and circular economy practices can reduce operational costs while improving profit margins over time.
- Market Access and Growth – access to new customers segments focused on sustainability.
- Strategic Positioning – building stakeholder relationships that can develop over time, while positing the organization for future growth.
What is the real added value of the CreaSus project?
The CreaSus project provides unique value through the European collaboration bringing together partners from Spain, Greece, Belgium, Italy and Ireland to share knowledge and best practices.
The variety of CCSI’s involved is extensive, from game-design studios to festivals, theatre companies, creative arts, and more. This diversity gives multiple perspectives and insights that wouldn’t be possible in a single-country or single-sector approach.
What are the best insights that you have gotten until now from the CreaSus project?
As a partner, it has been really interesting to learn about challenges that exist in each of the partner countries. While there are a lot of crossovers, some countries have specific challenges linked to localisation, their culture and systems. Insights such as market and non-market values, intangible cultural aspects, crafts being lost through the years and the fact that sometimes we need policies to protect this has been eye-opening. However, the best insight is probably realising that for the Creative and Cultural sector it’s vital that these industries come together and collaborate in order to beneift the most from sustainable business practices and elarn from each other – being in quite a niche and volunteer led sector poses a lot of challenges but they can be overcome when collaboration is at the heart of it.
