The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are unlike any other economic sector. Although several reasons support this claim, arguably every distinctive aspect stems from one key factor: whereas in most industries the concept of value is relatively stable, in the CCIs, value is often a non-linear, polysemic term that is calculated according to its own idiosyncratic set of metrics. In other words, the classical notion—as established by Michael Porter in Competitive Advantage (1985) [1]—that a product or a service can add value through a chain of discrete activities mediated by a business model and oriented towards monetisation, is only one of the several dimensions of value present in the CCIs. Porter’s value-chain framework, which disaggregates the economic activity into a sequence of value-adding steps and assumes a causal, one-directional flow of value from producer to buyer, encounters immediate difficulties when applied to the CCIs. As Richard Caves documented in Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce [2], creative industries are defined by a set of properties that resist the linear logic of the value chain: pervasive product differentiation, deeply uncertain consumer valuations, and the existence of artistic inputs whose contractual arrangements are highly unstable. These properties are not incidental but constitutive, shaping the organisational structures and professional cultures of creative production in ways that have no close analogue in manufacturing or service industries. More recent scholarship on business model innovation has further complicated the linear value-creation picture. Foss and Saebi [3] argue that business model innovation—the reconfiguration of how firms create, deliver, and capture value—represents one of the most consequential and yet theoretically underexplored strategic challenges facing contemporary organisations, a point that resonates acutely in the CCIs where revenue models are under continuous pressure from digitisation and platform competition. Carter and Carter [4], developing a creative business model canvas specifically for the cultural and creative industries, similarly argue that the standard business model frameworks developed for manufacturing or technology firms require fundamental adaptation before they can capture the relational, cultural, and community-oriented dimensions of value that characterise creative enterprises.

The limitations of the linear value-chain model have been further underscored in subsequent scholarship. David Throsby, in Economics and Culture [5], argued that cultural goods must be understood as bearing two distinct and not always commensurable forms of value: economic value, rooted in market exchange, and cultural value—a multidimensional concept encompassing aesthetic, spiritual, social, historical, and symbolic dimensions that cannot be reduced to willingness-to-pay metrics. This dual character of value is what justifies the distinctive public policy treatment of cultural goods and institutions, and it poses a direct challenge to any framework that treats value as a single, monetisable quantity. More recently, Ulrike Rohn and Mats Nylund [6], examining value creation in the television audience market, demonstrated that even the notion of a ‘value network’ understates the complexity of value generation in media, proposing instead the concept of an ‘activity net’ of value creation in which audiences and providers are co-producers. Rohn and Ibrus [7] have extended this analysis to emergent digital technologies, arguing that frameworks must account for cultural, social, and economic value simultaneously and dynamically.

The CCIs’ economic significance is, notwithstanding this conceptual complexity, substantial and well documented. At the European level, the cultural and creative industries generate approximately 3.95% of EU value added, employ around 8 million people, and comprise 1.2 million firms [8], most of them small and medium enterprises (SMEs). More comprehensive estimates, using broader sectoral definitions that include non-core creative activities, have placed the contribution of the total creative industries at approximately 6.8% of European GDP and 6.5% of the EU workforce [9]. In the United States, the most recent data from the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account—a joint product of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis—confirm that arts and cultural economic activity accounted for 4.2% of GDP, or $1.17 trillion, in 2023, growing at more than twice the rate of the broader economy between 2022 and 2023 [10]. These figures affirm that the CCIs are not a marginal or luxury sector but a significant and dynamic component of modern economies.

However, the activity of many CCIs operates beyond the rules of supply and demand. It intersects with specific sectoral regulations, notions of public service, and state-funded initiatives that shape its form. For this reason, the activity of many actors in this sector does not need, nor is it indeed intended to, generate monetary profit. As David Hesmondhalgh observed [11], this sector occupies a space in which symbolic goods—goods whose primary purpose is to communicate meaning and affect experience—are subject to particular and recurring uncertainties of production and reception that distinguish them from ordinary commodities. A substantial share of CCI activity operates in a field where public and private organisations with distinct missions and logics intersect.

The breadth of what constitutes the CCIs has been extensively debated. The European Commission has adopted a broad definition, understanding the sector to include all fields whose activities are based on cultural values or artistic and other individual or collective creative expressions, spanning architecture, audiovisual media (film, television, video games and multimedia), design, performing arts, music, publishing, and cultural heritage, among others [12]. This definitional breadth has direct consequences for education: it means that the workforce of the CCIs is extraordinarily diverse in its occupational profiles, competence requirements, and modes of employment. Within this broad landscape, the present entry focuses primarily on the audiovisual and film sector as its principal case. This choice is deliberate: film is among the most structurally complex of the creative industries, combining industrial and artisanal modes of production, public and private funding logics, and career trajectories that are simultaneously craft-based and entrepreneurially demanding. At the same time, the arguments developed here apply across the CCIs more broadly, and references to the wider creative industries are made wherever the evidence or logic of the argument so requires.

There is one thing to which none of the CCIs are an exception: they rely on highly skilled work and a vast, ever-changing array of occupational profiles. The skills the industry needs and the training provided by educational institutions at every level may diverge, sometimes sharply. This skills gap has attracted increasing scholarly and policy attention. Grácio, Kitching, Zehle, Alves, Crombie, Rui Graça, and Pirola [13], in a chapter on mapping and futuring strategic competencies for the creative workforce in the De Gruyter Handbook of Creative Industries, offer a systematic account of how the CCI workforce’s competence needs are being identified, mapped, and projected across the European context. Their analysis underscores both the breadth of skills at stake—spanning technical, entrepreneurial, intercultural, and digital dimensions—and the importance of anticipatory, forward-looking methodologies for a sector whose occupational landscape is in continuous evolution. The same imperative is reflected in the CresCine European Industry Skills Report [14], produced under the Horizon Europe-supported CresCine project, which surveyed more than 12,000 European film professionals and conducted several focus groups across almost all small European markets. The report identifies a persistent cross-national deficit in business strategy, management, and entrepreneurial skills as one of the most critical gaps facing the European film workforce and explicitly recommends integrating robust entrepreneurial skills training at all levels of education and professional development as a strategic priority. Further impetus comes from initiatives such as Cyanotypes, funded by the European Commission, which works with what it terms ‘competence ecosystems’—learning systems that can adapt and evolve over time and across contexts [15].

A further structural feature of the CCIs that is directly relevant to entrepreneurship education is the predominance of precarious and portfolio-based work. Research using the United Kingdom’s Labour Force Survey has found that second-job holding is twice as common in core creative occupations as in other sectors, and that up to 88% of workers in music, performing, and visual arts are self-employed. Creative workers therefore routinely navigate multiple employers, income streams, and professional identities simultaneously. This structural reality makes entrepreneurial competences not a supplementary benefit but a near-essential component of professional survival.

Within the broader literature on entrepreneurship education, three closely related but analytically distinct concepts recur with particular frequency when applied to the CCIs: entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and creative entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship—in its classical sense—denotes the process of identifying, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities for the creation of new ventures and value. Applied to the CCIs, it typically refers to the founding or co-founding of independent creative enterprises: a production company, an animation studio, a record label, a gallery, or a freelance practice. The entrepreneurial process in this context is understood to be tightly coupled with the identification and realisation of opportunities within the cultural and creative domain [16,17].

Intrapreneurship, by contrast, refers to entrepreneurial activity undertaken within an existing organisation. The concept was introduced by Gifford Pinchot III, whose 1985 book Intrapreneuring popularised the term and defined intrapreneurs as ‘dreamers who do’—individuals who take hands-on responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable reality without leaving the corporate environment [18]. In the CCI context, intrapreneurship takes on particular significance in larger organisations such as broadcasting corporations, studios, or cultural institutions, where individuals who develop new formats, services, or internal initiatives may be acting intrapreneurially. For entrepreneurship education, this implies that preparing students for careers in larger CCI organisations is not simply a matter of teaching compliance with existing structures, but of fostering the dispositions and skills needed to innovate within them.

Creative entrepreneurship may be defined as the process of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities within the CCIs, related to cultural products and services, through which artists and creative workers achieve autonomy and secure income [16]. What distinguishes creative entrepreneurship from conventional entrepreneurship is the ongoing negotiation between artistic vision and market logic, between cultural value and commercial viability—a tension documented extensively in empirical research on European film production companies [19]. As Näsholm notes in a recent integrative review [20], cultural entrepreneurs are fundamentally distinguished from ‘traditional’ entrepreneurs by an orientation towards continuous artistic innovation and unique value creation that is resistant to the scalable, market-focused growth logic that dominates mainstream entrepreneurship discourse. Entrepreneurship education that ignores this tension—by treating the CCIs as simply another sector in which to apply standard business principles—is likely to be experienced by creative students as irrelevant or hostile to their artistic identities.

The formal recognition of entrepreneurship as a key competence for all European citizens took its most consequential institutional form in the Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning (2006/962/EC) [21]. In that document, ‘sense of initiative and entrepreneurship’ was identified as one of eight key competences that every individual needs for personal fulfilment, active citizenship, social inclusion, and employability. The Recommendation defined this competence as referring to an individual’s ability to turn ideas into action, encompassing creativity, innovation, and risk-taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects in order to achieve objectives. The European Commission reinforced this framing in its Communication ‘Fostering entrepreneurial mindsets through education and learning’ (COM/2006/0033) [22], which emphasised that entrepreneurial competences should be cultivated from primary school to university.

The 2006 Recommendation was updated and replaced by a new Council Recommendation of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning (2018/C 189/01) [23], which refined and broadened the framework in response to social, economic, and technological changes. In the 2018 iteration, entrepreneurship is understood as a competence applicable to all spheres of life, enabling not only the creation of businesses but also the development of civic agency, the capacity to respond to uncertainty, and the ability to create cultural and social—as well as economic—value. The EntreComp: The Entrepreneurship Competence Framework, developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre [24], constitutes the principal operational tool for translating this policy commitment into educational practice. EntreComp defines entrepreneurship as a process of acting upon opportunities and ideas in order to transform them into value for others—financial, cultural, or social. The framework comprises fifteen competences organised across three interrelated areas: ‘Ideas and Opportunities’, ‘Resources’, and ‘Into Action’, mapped across an eight-level progression model from foundation to expert level.

Despite this robust policy framework, the implementation of entrepreneurship education programmes across Europe and beyond remains deeply uneven. Banha, Coelho, and Flores [25], in a systematic literature review, confirmed that the understanding of how countries manage the implementation of such programmes is not only a ‘missing link’ in academic discussion but a documented gap in scholarly knowledge. A complementary study [26] demonstrated that NUTS III regional structures in the EU play a significant role in explaining the diffusion and implementation of entrepreneurship education programmes, and that geographic and administrative asymmetries at the subnational level are among the principal determinants of uneven take-up. Banha’s doctoral research [27] documented this phenomenon in the Portuguese case in particular depth, showing that the number of students receiving entrepreneurship education during compulsory schooling had historically been residual. More recently, Banha, Graça, Góis, and Banha [28] have critically examined the newly approved Portuguese Framework for Entrepreneurship Education (REE) in the context of the EntreComp model, arguing that practical barriers—including inconsistent policy support, inadequate teacher training, and a lack of cohesive instructional frameworks—continue to impede systematic implementation.