Our EIT HEI-funded CreaTech consortium took its work on entrepreneurial capacity building in the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs) to the British Academy of Management's 2026 conference this month, presenting "An Eclectic Approach to Entrepreneurial Capacity Development in Creative and Cultural Industries" to fellow management researchers from across the UK and beyond.

The paper was presented by Dr Sanaz Vatankhah (University of Bedfordshire) on behalf of the project team — Professor Levent Altinay (Oxford Brookes University), Dorina Kripa, Agron Mustafa and Dorina Koci (University of Tirana), Maja Pucelj (EMUNI University), Miriam Lanzetta (Lascò Srl), and Piera Buonincontri (CNR-ISMed) — and set out CreaTech's core positioning: entrepreneurship in the creative and cultural industries isn't a course students take, it's institutional infrastructure that has to be built.

We also shared early findings from our embedded research stream, using LEGO® Serious Play to examine how Gen Z students construct entrepreneurship under conditions of AI ubiquity. The headline: Gen Z doesn't want AI removed from entrepreneurial decision-making, they want it governed. Subordinate to human judgement, bounded by institutional accountability, and, in one participant's words, coming after you "use your brain first."

This session is part of CreaTech's dissemination activity across our six-country consortium — the UK, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Albania and Kosovo — as we build toward our Phase 2 targets of 480 students and 8+ supported start-ups.