Janos Keresnyei, Driver of Creative Ecosystems and Cultural Innovation
JUNE 2026"Cultural and creative industries are not a luxury; they are one of the most powerful engines of economic development"
With more than thirty years of experience in television, radio, audiovisual production, cluster development, and strategic consulting, Janos Keresnyei has spent decades working at the intersection of culture, creativity, and business. As the co-founder of the Creative Industry Cluster of Pécs and a key figure in the Cultural Innovation Competence Centre (CICC) in Hungary, he is currently participating in CREMEL 2.0 International Bootcamp, which focuses on digital transformation and the integration of artificial intelligence in cultural and creative industries.
On the occasion of his participation in the meeting organized by the BDCC in Bilbao, we spoke with him about the strategic role of creativity, the challenges of AI, and the importance of building solid collaborative ecosystems in Europe.
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“ The thread that runs through all of my work - across television, radio, film, cluster development, and business consulting - is the conviction that creative practice only becomes meaningful when it generates lasting change in the work of others. Whether I was introducing Hungary's first tapeless television studio in the mid-1990s, building a cluster ecosystem for creative SMEs in Pécs, or developing an intangible asset methodology for small businesses, the underlying question was always the same: how do we translate creative and technological potential into durable, transferable knowledge? But there is a deeper motivation behind all of this: I have always been driven by the need to understand - and to help others understand - how the cultural and creative professions actually work. There is something remarkable about the fact that nowhere is it written down how a theatre production comes together, and yet it does. Nowhere is the process fully codified for how a film is assembled from its many interdependent elements, and yet it happens. The value chains are rarely mapped, the processes exist in the heads of a relatively small number of experienced practitioners, and the industrial logic of creative work still comes as a surprise to many policymakers - even today. This gap between the complexity of creative practice and the limited understanding of it in policy and business environments has been the constant provocation of my career. I have spent thirty years at the intersection of culture, technology, and enterprise, and in each context, I have encountered the same challenge: the systems around us are rarely ready for what is actually possible. My defining thread, then, is not a particular medium or sector - it is the willingness to introduce ideas before their time, absorb the resistance that follows, and persist long enough to see them become standard practice.
You have spent over 30 years working across television, radio, film production, and creative business development. Looking back, what has been the defining thread running through all of these experiences?
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You co-founded the Creative Industry Cluster in Hungary and later led CICC (Cultural Innovation Competence Centre). What gap did you see in the ecosystem that made you decide to build these structures?“ When I began advocating for a creative industry cluster in Pécs in the early 2000s, the gap was not primarily financial - it was conceptual. The cultural sector and the business sector simply did not speak the same language. Artists and cultural managers regarded the application of business logic to creative work as a form of contamination; policymakers, on the other hand, had no framework for recognising the economic value of creative activity. The turning point came from a very practical realisation. Neither the cluster nor the CICC were founded alone - both emerged from conversations among a group of us who were leading the major creative and cultural organisations in the city. Together, we were employing close to a thousand people. And yet, when we sat down and looked honestly at what we were doing, we realised that we did not truly understand the business opportunities in front of us - and we were not using them. That gap between the scale of what we were collectively operating and the poverty of our shared business thinking was the founding insight behind both structures. The Creative Industry Cluster was conceived precisely to bridge this divide - to create a horizontal, value-chain-based ecosystem in which creative SMEs could collaborate, compete in European markets, and be taken seriously as economic actors. The CICC followed the same logic: it emerged from the recognition that cultural innovation is not an accident or a gift - it is a competence that can be identified, developed, and transferred. Neither structure was built because the resources or the political will were there. They were built because the absence of such structures was making it impossible for talented creative professionals to grow beyond the boundaries of their individual practice - and because a group of us had finally become honest enough to admit that we were part of the problem.
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You operate at the intersection of culture, creativity, and business strategy. How do you personally define the cultural and creative industries - and why do you think that definition still matters in policy debates today?“ I use the EU's own framework as my starting point - the cultural and creative industries encompass all sectors whose outputs are rooted in cultural expression and whose value lies primarily in intellectual and creative content rather than material production. But in practice, I define them by what they do rather than what they are: they convert human creativity into economic and social value, while retaining the cultural meaning embedded in that creativity. This dual nature - simultaneously cultural and economic - is precisely what makes the definition so contested and so important. In policy debates, a narrow cultural definition leads to subsidy logic (the sector is protected, but not developed), while a narrow economic definition leads to marketisation without cultural grounding. The EU's approach, reflected in instruments such as the Creative Europe programme and the New European Bauhaus, recognises this duality - but at the national level, many member states, including Hungary, still struggle to operationalise it. At the heart of my own definition is copyright. I regard intellectual property - and specifically the exploitation of copyright - as the fundamental engine of the cultural and creative industries. This is not a legal technicality; it is the economic foundation on which the entire sector rests. We live from the exploitation of copyright. And yet, even among creative professionals themselves, the understanding of copyright's nature remains surprisingly underdeveloped. At the same time, I believe strongly that every creative ecosystem must preserve a freely accessible dimension open access, public domain, and creative commons frameworks are not a threat to the sector's economic model, but a necessary condition for its cultural vitality. Getting the definition right matters because it determines whether the sector is treated as a strategic asset or a charitable case. Without a shared understanding of copyright as the sector's core value mechanism, the value chains within the creative industries remain invisible - and invisible value chains cannot be managed, funded, or scaled. This is not an abstract policy question. It is the reason why policymakers still look with surprise at the idea that creative work can be organised and developed like any other industry.
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Beyond your institutional roles, you are also a mentor and peer reviewer. What does that side of your work teach you that formal management positions do not?“ Formal management positions give you authority; mentoring and peer reviewing give you feedback - and those are very different things. When you are in a leadership role, people tend to tell you what they think you want to hear. When you are a mentor or a peer reviewer, the dynamic is reversed: you are in the service of the other person's development, and that requires you to listen carefully, suspend your own assumptions, and engage with their reality rather than yours. But what makes my perspective on this question somewhat particular is the path I took to get here. Since the age of sixteen, I have worked my way through the creative industries from the ground up - moving through multiple sectors, starting at the bottom of each, and learning the logic of each discipline from within. That experience of having genuinely inhabited different roles is, I think, the foundation of whatever usefulness I have as a mentor. I do not advise from the outside; I advise from shared experience. The CLOCK community has added a further and distinct dimension to this. CLOCK is an international community of professional practitioners built around a simple but radical conviction: that the skills and knowledge developed through non-formal learning and professional practice deserve the same recognition as those acquired through formal academic pathways. Through a rigorous, peer-based reflective process, CLOCK makes invisible skills visible and aligns them with international professional and higher education standards - up to EQF Level 7, equivalent to master's level. It is not a traditional qualification programme; it is a living professional community, and a genuinely global one. As a Sector Expert and Peer Reviewer within CLOCK, I have had the opportunity to engage with creative professionals from vastly different cultural, economic, and institutional contexts. What this work has taught me is that expertise is always situated. What works in one context, one region, one sector, does not automatically transfer to another. The process of reviewing others' work honestly and constructively has made me more rigorous about my own assumptions, and more humble about the limits of any single model or methodology. The most important questions in our sector are rarely technical. They are about values, trust, and the courage to act on what you believe before the environment around you is ready for it. Peer reviewing, more than any other professional practice I know, keeps that truth visible.
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How would you describe the current situation of the cultural and creative industries in Hungary - in terms of recognition, funding, and political support?“ The honest answer is that the past sixteen years have been a story of missed potential. There were genuine attempts to develop the creative industries as a strategic sector. But over time, this space too was absorbed into the network of organisations and business interests aligned with those in power. What began as a sector development agenda gradually became entangled with family-influenced business structures and political patronage. This is not a peripheral observation - it is the central structural reality that anyone working seriously in the Hungarian creative industries has had to navigate. The consequences have been significant: fragmented and politically conditioned funding, the erosion of independent creative voices through the systematic acquisition of media and cultural organisations, and a persistent gap between the sophistication of the policy documents and the reality on the ground for creative SMEs, freelancers, and micro-enterprises. And yet, the situation is not static. Just recently, we won a significant new grant that supports us and the network of chambers of commerce and industry in a deliberate and ambitious effort: to scale our creative industry cluster to national level and to build a sustainable, genuinely influential system based on the quadruple helix model - integrating the creative sector, business, public institutions, and civil society in a coherent national framework. This is not a pilot or an experiment; it is a strategic commitment to building the kind of independent, resilient ecosystem that the sector has needed for decades. That, for me, is the most important development in the Hungarian creative industries right now.
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Artificial intelligence is generating both excitement and anxiety in creative communities. What is your honest view - is AI a genuine opportunity for CCI professionals, or does it carry risks that are not being taken seriously enough?“ Both - and framing the question as an either/or is itself part of the problem. The European Project CREMEL 2.0 captures this tension precisely: professionals across six European nations consistently described what we came to call 'transformation anxiety' - the simultaneous conviction that AI will be transformative and the uncertainty about how to engage with it purposefully. My own view is fundamentally optimistic, but conditionally so. AI is an extraordinary partner and tool for creative professionals - not a replacement, not a threat in itself, but something closer to what one of our interviewed practitioners described perfectly: 'a pencil in our hands, while the thought remains with us.' Used with intention, AI can dramatically expand what individual practitioners are capable of. Our research found that professionals who have moved from unconscious to conscious AI use are already achieving efficiency gains of between 20% and 60% in supporting tasks, while maintaining full creative authorship at the core of their work. But the risks are real, and in my view three of them are not being taken seriously enough. The first is the erosion of intellectual property rights. I regard copyright as the fundamental engine of the cultural and creative industries and the training datasets underpinning most commercial AI tools contain creative work that was ingested without consent or compensation. The second risk is the concentration of benefit if the tools and the knowledge remain in the hands of well-resourced organisations, the ecosystem will become less diverse. The third risk is what our research calls the 'competence trap': the 52.7% of professionals currently operating at medium AI familiarity know enough to feel they are engaging with AI, but lack the depth for transformative implementation. The European Project CREMEL 2.0 is, among other things, a direct response to all three of these risks - a commitment to open-source, democratised, and practitioner-centred AI literacy that keeps the creative professional in the driving seat. In historical terms, I believe AI represents for the creative industries what the printing press represented for knowledge - and in that sense, it may also mark, as McLuhan anticipated, the end of the Gutenberg galaxy itself.
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The European Project CREMEL 2.0 aims to produce open-source learning tools and methodologies. What does it mean in practice to design training that actually reaches and serves CCI operators across different countries and contexts?“ It means starting from where people actually are - not from where you think they should be. This sounds simple, but it is the principle that most training programmes violate, and it is the reason why so much AI education in the creative sector has failed to land. Our research within the European Project CREMEL 2.0 was unambiguous on this point. Across 64 interviews in six countries and twelve sectors, the barriers to AI adoption were not primarily technical. Professionals were struggling because they could not see how AI was relevant to their specific practice, because they were uncertain about the ethical and legal implications - particularly around copyright and authorship - and because they lacked a trusted, peer-based context in which to experiment, make mistakes, and learn. 85% were navigating this entirely alone. Effective training for CCI operators must therefore be built on four principles that our curriculum deliberately embeds:
- First, it must be sector-specific: A fashion designer, a museum curator, and a video game developer face fundamentally different challenges, and generic digital literacy programmes address none of them adequately.
- Second, it must be practice-based: The most effective format identified across all six nations was hands-on workshops led by practitioners from the same sector, not lectures by technology experts.
- Third, it must be available in local languages Europe's 24 official languages are not an obstacle to be engineered around, they are a cultural reality to be respected.
- And fourth, it must be free at the point of use: The €20 per month subscription threshold that our research identified as a significant barrier to AI experimentation is a telling signal about the financial fragility of much of the sector.
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BDCC, Puglia Creativa, and CICC represent quite different regional approaches to supporting the creative sector. In your view, what does each of these models do especially well, and what can they learn from one another?“ The BDCC - the Basque District of Culture and Creativity - is a government-coordinated initiative, jointly driven by the Basque Government's departments of culture and economic development. What BDCC does especially well is translate creative sector development into regional industrial policy - it operates with the full weight of government commitment behind it, with a clear mandate, stable funding, and a long-term vision. That institutional anchoring gives it a credibility and a reach that bottom-up initiatives can rarely match. Puglia Creativa represents a different model: a productive district recognised by the Apulia Region, bringing together over 100 cultural and creative enterprises. Its strength lies in its territorial rootedness and its capacity to mobilise a diverse creative community in a southern European region where market forces alone would not sustain the sector. The CICC - our own contribution in Pécs - was built on entirely different foundations. It grew from the bottom up, from a group of creative sector leaders. Its institutional home is not a government agency but the Pécs Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which provides professional legitimacy and structural stability without political dependency. As we now move towards a national scale-up, that same model applies: the framework will be a chamber-based, public-body structure - not a political organisation. What all three share, and what I regard as the most important lesson for any region, is this: the models that work are those where political support provides stability and a clear policy vision, while the professional community retains genuine ownership of the content and direction. Where that balance is lost - where political support becomes political control - the ecosystem suffers. BDCC and Puglia Creativa both benefit from a political and regional environment that genuinely supports the sector. That stability is something we have had to build without in Hungary. At the same time, the bottom-up legitimacy of CICC, and its grounding in the chamber network, gives it a resilience and a professional credibility that top-down structures sometimes lack.
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To close: what would you like readers of the BDCC Magazine - policymakers, creative practitioners, project managers - to take away from your experience and from European Projects like CREMEL 2.0?“ I would like them to take away one conviction, one challenge, and one invitation. The conviction is this: the cultural and creative industries are not a soft sector, and they are not a luxury that prosperous societies can afford once the serious economic work is done. The causality runs in the opposite direction. When people live and work in a richly creative environment, they work better, they are more productive, and the economy around them prospers. The creative industries are not the reward for economic success - they are one of its most powerful drivers. Until policymakers internalise that logic, the sector will continue to be treated as a supplement rather than as a foundation. The challenge is this: artificial intelligence will not wait for the sector to be ready. In historical terms, I believe AI represents for the creative industries what the printing press represented for knowledge - and in that sense, it may also mark, as McLuhan anticipated, the end of the Gutenberg galaxy itself. That is not a reason for anxiety; it is a reason for urgency. Copyright, which I regard as the fundamental engine of our sector, must be defended and adapted in this new environment, not surrendered to the convenience of technological acceleration. European Projects like CREMEL 2.0 matter because they are building the open, accessible, practitioner-centred knowledge infrastructure that the sector needs to navigate this transition on its own terms. The invitation is this: come and find us. The pan-European community of professionals who think seriously about the creative industries is real. It is a thin community, and it needs to be thicker. It needs more face-to-face encounters, more honest exchange, more willingness to learn across borders and sectors. The national creative industry cluster we are building in Hungary - grounded in the quadruple helix model - is our contribution to that community. We believe that the strength of a network lies in the aggregate knowledge of its members, not in the knowledge held at the centre.
