Gerin Trautenberger
Chair of the Board, Creative FED — European Federation for Creative Economy
Gerin Trautenberger is Chair of the Board of Creative FED, the European Federation for Creative Economy. He leads the organisation's advocacy for Europe's cultural and creative sectors, working to have the creative economy recognised as a transformative force in building a more inclusive, sustainable and optimistic Europe. That advocacy rests on a specific conviction: the case has to be made in evidence, in the terms budget-holders actually use.
His career spans three decades at the intersection of the creative industries, innovation policy and entrepreneurship. He measures the sector's contribution to innovation and economic resilience, and argues that case in policy — turning evidence into support instruments and cross-industry innovation agendas. He has been President of Kreativwirtschaft Austria at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber since 2016, and a board member of the European Creative Business Network (ECBN) — Creative FED's predecessor — since 2016. He served as Managing Director of Creative FED / ECBN and, most recently, as Managing Director of the EIT Culture & Creativity Co-Location Centre South East & Alps (2023–2026). He has coordinated Horizon Europe, Erasmus+ and Interreg consortia securing €60m in grant funding.
Why measurement
Trautenberger's own argument starts with the statistics. Most innovation indicators were designed to measure R&D spending in manufacturing. They register patents, lab budgets and technical staff. Creative work rarely shows up in those categories, and its effects usually appear somewhere else — in the manufacturer that redesigns a product, the firm that changes how it communicates. The value is real but lands outside the sector that produced it, so the official numbers understate it.
Closing that gap means developing indicators and evaluation methods that stand up to scrutiny from a finance ministry, not only a culture ministry. The political stake is straightforward. As long as the creative sector cannot demonstrate its economic contribution in the terms budget-holders use, it will be funded as culture — as a cost — rather than as innovation policy, where the money is.
Skills and policy
Since 2019 he has worked on urgent skills needs and future competences for creative professionals through a series of Erasmus+ projects aimed at reshaping the European skills and training landscape — among them the Blueprint project CYANOTYPES and CREDEX, which develops micro-credentials for individual learning accounts (ILAs) in the CCIs. Since 2023 he has coordinated the Large-Scale Partnership for the CCI ecosystem under the European Pact for Skills, which launched the Creative Skills Week.
He recently launched Creative Stack, an initiative making visible the work and competences of creative professionals as a condition for Europe's digital and cultural sovereignty; the underlying argument is set out in the Creative FED white paper CreativeStack — an Innovation Infrastructure (2026), co-authored with Gerbrand Bas. In summer 2026 he initiated the Brandbrief campaign, backed by more than 200 organisations, calling for €800m in dedicated innovation funding for the CCIs under the forthcoming European Competitiveness Fund and the next Framework Programme.
Research and earlier career
A researcher as well as a practitioner, he holds a Master of Social Science in Media Studies from Uppsala University and is a PhD candidate in Media & Communication Studies at the University of Vienna. He has served as evaluator and rapporteur for the European Commission under Horizon 2020.
He began as a designer in 1994. He co-founded Datenwerk in 1993, one of Austria's first full-service web development studios, which became Blue-C AG in 1998 and went public on the Neuer Markt in Frankfurt in 2000. He later founded and led the design and innovation studio Microgiants in Vienna. He trained as a product and furniture designer at Kingston University.
Selected roles
- Chair of the Board — Creative FED, European Federation for Creative Economy (since 2025)
- Coordinator — Large-Scale Partnership for the CCI ecosystem, European Pact for Skills (since 2023)
- Former Managing Director — EIT Culture & Creativity, Co-Location Centre South East & Alps (2023–2026)
- Former Managing Director — Creative FED / ECBN (2022–2024)
- President — Kreativwirtschaft Austria, Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (since 2016)
- Board member — European Creative Business Network (ECBN) (since 2016)
- Leadership Board Member — European Design Innovation Initiative (EDII), European Commission (2011–2012)
- Founder — Microgiants GmbH Research & Design, Vienna (2006)