Shanghai kicks off major culture and creative industry competition

The third "Cultural and Creative Industry Shanghai" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition kicked off on Tuesday, aiming to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in Shanghai and drive the development of the city's cultural and creative industry.

The competition sets up four tracks – "Smart Future Plus","Original Content Production Plus","Creative Empowerment of Fashionable Consumer Goods Plus" and a special track "Music Innovation Plus," focusing on digital creativity, content IPs, cultural consumption, and fashion design.

Of these, "Smart Future Plus" highlights empowering future-oriented tracks, hoping to effectively address the hot issues and challenges confronting the cultural and creative industry in the future through innovation in products, applications, services, and scenarios, and further promoting the development of the industry in new directions and towards intelligence.

In recent years, promoting the integrated development of culture, tourism, commerce, sports and exhibitions while building a cross-border integrated economic ecosystem have become important engines for boosting consumption and driving local economic transformation and upgrade.

This year's competition highlights the integration of cultural creativity into the overall urban development and focuses on exploring innovative models for promoting consumption and the deep integration of cutting-edge design, avant-garde creativity, and cultural, sports, and tourism resources.

The "Creative Empowerment of Fashionable Consumer Goods Plus" track will select new guochao (China-chic) goods and application scenarios with fashionable elements, while the "Original Content Production Plus" track stimulates the potential of cultural consumption, focusing on areas such as short dramas, games, film and stage performances, as well as anime IPs, the cultural economy, museums, copyright protection and trading, and green and low-carbon development of cultural and creative industry.

This year's competition has two categories – startup and growth. It has further relaxed restrictions and expanded the application scope: Cultural and creative enterprises with a business revenue of less than 100 million yuan (US$13.73 million) in 2024, individually registered studios, and entrepreneurial teams recommended by universities from home and abroad are all eligible to apply.

In addition to the basic award bonuses, winning enterprises will receive support involving a full-chain service system which includes incubation and cultivation, program settlement, financial services, roadshows, and legal services. They will also be given priority for participating in various support funds and entrepreneurship guarantee loan applications.

Applications are now open on www.sccipa.com.cn and the awards ceremony will be held in the second half of this year.

Since 2022, the competition has attracted more than 1,500 enterprise participants and discovered a number of innovative, high-potential, and industry-leading teams.