What we’re doing
Our missions to turbo-charge the West Midlands creative content sector
Our extensive conversations with industry, public sector and individuals have allowed us to identify five priority areas, listed below, that would benefit from Create Central action and provide the most effective interventions to enable us to reach our vision for the West Midlands creative content sector of 2030.
Shape the Future: 2030 and Beyond
Find out about our five missions
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IP Content Fund
Future funding for the West Midlands to help develop ideas. READ MORE…
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Monetising Content
Making it easier to sell creative content. READ MORE…
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Future Media
Making the West Midlands the future of content creation. READ MORE…
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Games Sector
Finding new ways to support the West Midlands games sector. READ MORE…
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Sustainability
Making the West Midlands the home of sustainable content creation. READ MORE…
Skills, equity, diversity, and inclusion are cross-cutting themes through all our five missions, and we have been selected as one of the BFI's skills clusters to support this activity.
Create Central is delighted to have been chosen as one of six UK BFI Skills Clusters, which aim to build local skills bases by helping people across the West Midlands, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, find viable routes into the screen industry and effective career development support.
“Our hugely successful industry-first model, pioneered through Create Central’s bootcamps, seeks to fill existing gaps, providing real opportunities to diverse local talent.
With this support from the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery, and West Midlands Combined Authority, I’m delighted we’ll be able to deliver a range of activities over the next three years which will create a skilled local workforce to meet our growing production needs.
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West Midlands Create Growth Programme
Create Central, in partnership with the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and Creative UK, is delivering the next phase of the Create Growth Programme which will help creative businesses to scale, with access to major new investment opportunities.
Responsible business will be at the heart of the programme, sustainability, equity, diversity and inclusion are all key drivers for successful long-term business growth.
The Create Growth Programme is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and follows on from the commitment from the UK Government to prioritise development of the creative sector and wider industry to ensure creative businesses can flourish. Creative UK is already delivering Create Growth Programmes in the North-East, Cornwall and South-East, and is extending that work by partnering with Create Central in the West Midlands to launch programmes that are tailored to the region and the creative sub-sectors based there.
A key aim of the Create Growth Programme is to support creative businesses to explore and secure commercial investment opportunities. To this end each of the selected regions will have a programme of activity that will enable businesses to be ready for investment and facilitate access to additional funding from Innovate UK and commercial investors in 2024 and beyond.
Create Central’s new R&D support pilot programme complements and works in partnership with the West Midlands Create Growth Programme.
Innovation
Virtual Innovation Team
Create Central represents the creative industries on the Virtual Innovation Team, which comprises business facing innovation experts hosted by a range of regional cluster/sector bodies.
Between them they support businesses in all the sectors and major market opportunities of the West Midlands Plan for Growth to recover and grow through innovation.
Our innovation projects
Find out more about some of the exciting innovation projects we’ve been working on to provide opportunities for creative businesses in the West Midlands.