Representatives from Nottingham Trent University recently united with organisations from across Europe to launch the Organza project; a unique collaboration which aims to improve support for the continent's creative industries.

Organza will build on the creative entrepreneurship, innovation, design support and education expertise of its 13 partner organisations to explore the conditions necessary for creative industries to thrive, and subsequently make policy recommendations to authorities at all levels; local, regional, national and European.

The three year is part financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the INTERREG IVC programme and will focus on medium-sized regions and cities, such as Navarra in the north of Spain and cities like Arnhem, Bremen and Presov, which have incomplete production structures and face a 'brain drain' of creative talent to larger cities. The effectiveness of past initiatives  developed to support creative industries will be analysed, along with the entire value chain; from design to production, including retailing and craft activities.

Lynn Oxborrow, Marketing, Retail and Operations lecturer at Nottingham Business School, is leading the project at Nottingham Trent University. She said 'In Europe, many local and regional initiatives are being developed to foster the growth of the creative industries or their restructuring. However, they often lack the impetus to sustain on-going growth and, through sharing existing good practices and uncovering their critical success factors, this project will really help the competitiveness of creative industries across the partnership and beyond.

'Organza is designed to have a positive effect on sustainable growth, social cohesion and the ability to attract new initiatives. The challenge is to boost entrepreneurship but also to foster industrial change, as well as to create synergies between creativity and industry.'

The project hopes to strengthen regional economies by developing and evaluating new policy tools and sharing experiences between European regions and cities. As part of this, the information generated will be collated into a major database to allow it to be shared easily. Further European regions will also benefit from the work of Organza through publications and good practice presented in various seminars.

For more information, please contact Lynn Oxborrow at Nottingham Trent University on +44 (0) 115 848 6048, or email lynn.oxborrow@ntu.ac.uk