Client: Innovation and Creative Economy (ICE) consortium, led by Fraunhofer
Date: 2020 – 2022
Location: Europe-wide
Bax supported the development of the winning proposal for what is now the EIT Culture & Creativity Knowledge and Innovation Community. Working with the Innovation by Creative Economy (ICE) consortium with Fraunhofer as coordinator, Bax provided full development support to a consortium of more than 150 partners, helping to shape, manage, and deliver a highly collaborative proposal process for a new European innovation initiative in the cultural and creative sectors and industries European partnership designed to address specific global challenges by connecting the Knowledge Triangle: business, education, and research.
Challenge
The ICE consortium responded to the clear need for a dedicated innovation initiative such as a Knowledge and Innovation Community to strengthen innovation capacity, entrepreneurship, and collaboration across Europe’s cultural and creative sectors and industries. Developing the proposal required aligning this large and highly diverse group of partners across countries, sectors, and organisation types around a shared vision, structure, and strategic direction. The main challenge was to structure, process, and prioritise a high volume of input and discussion generated over a long co-creation process. This meant translating a broad range of ideas, perspectives, and content contributions into a coherent and competitive proposal with a clear narrative, strong focus, and consistent level of quality throughout.
Approach
Bax provided end-to-end support throughout the nearly two-year proposal development process. This included process design and process management, support for strategic and content development, coordination of partner input, and proposal writing.
Bax also facilitated 24 workshops involving more than 150 partners across the consortium. These workshops supported ideation, content gathering, and prioritisation, and were complemented by the set-up and facilitation of a mixed expert group to help further develop key elements of the proposal.
In addition, Bax supported the development of a baseline report, synthesised workshop and expert input into a structured proposal logic, and helped translate complex discussions into clear proposal content, governance design, business model elements, impact framing, and key visuals.
Impact