ORGANZA's objective is to systematically collect and exchange policy experiences of local and regional authorities regarding creative industries. ORGANZA focuses on medium size regions and cities that lack critical mass and face brain drain of creative talent. A key element in the lack of critical mass is an incomplete production structure and environment. Often either creative entrepreneurship or industrial entrepreneurship dominates. The challenge is to dynamize entrepreneurship but also to foster industrial change. Synergies between creativity and industry is an objective sought after, in line with the Lisbon agenda, but often not attained at a regional level. A European dimension may enable synergies and attainment of critical mass. Cities and regions have struggled in defining policies for creative industries. ORGANZA brings together cities and regions with different profiles of creative sectors, which enables capitalisation from the project results.Partners in ORGANZA may be at the stage of policy inception, at the stage of studies or stakeholder consultations, they may have developed instruments (promotion actions, incubators, training programs etc…) or they may have integrated several instruments in a coherent framework or extended policies for creative industries to other areas. ORGANZA brings together partners at different stages of policy making and with different models of policy development in terms of competences and means, in terms of articulation between local and national policies and in form of implementation. ORGANZA enables regions to understand the relevance of policies with regard to their specific competences. Results also enable structured understanding by non-partner regions. The involvement of public authorities in ORGANZA will enable to understand how to leverage results from past, current and future ERDF funded projects for creative industries.The ORGANZA project is structured around a strong methodological core. This is required since it is a new policy area, hence a taxonomy of collecting regional profiles and experiences is an important element. A structured database with search engine enables systematic access, customized to the profile of the interested region. ORGANZA then entails a collection and validation of experiences including stakeholder assessment. From this systematic collection, a limited set of inspiring practices is selected for transfer. Limited pilot actions will focus on the three stages of the policy process: inception, instrumentation and integration. ORGANZA includes capacity building in the form of seminars as well as dissemination actions with a focus on stakeholders. The project is set up in order to prepare for regional action plans and possibly a Interreg IVc Capitalisation project. Achievements: At the beginning of 2010, 13 organizations from all over Europe gathered in Arnhem, the Netherlands, to launch the Organza project. The conference kickstarted the projects activities that will last for three years. Organza is a unique interregional collaboration between organizations with an expertise in creative entrepreneurship, innovation, design support, education and the like. Building on the partners varied experiences and contexts, Organza aims to investigate the necessary conditions for the success of creative and designledindustries. From there, the project will make policy recommendations to authorities at all levels (regional, local, national and European). Organza aims at improving policymakingin the field of creative industries and to strengthen regional economies by developing and evaluating new policy instruments, sharing experiences between different European regions and mediumsized cities. To achieve its objectives Organza brings together 13 partners with different models of policy development and which are at different stages of policy making. Since it is a new policy area, methodologies are to be developed to enable partners to compare and contrast the structure of creative industries and the supporting infrastructure within their regions and assess the effectiveness of the many initiatives that have been developed to support them. The information generated will be collated into a major database to facilitate the sharing of information. From this comprehensive collection of data, a limited set of practices is selected for transfer between cities and regions. Focusing on the three stages of the policy process (creation, piloting and implementation), the transfer of experience and good practice will be evaluated by the project partners.In the first year of Organza, good practices were identified in 9 regions covered by the project. The good practices were further assessed via regional visits, where each region was visited by at least 3 project partners. The insights gained through these visits combined with research carried out by partners resulted in regional profiles for all partner regions, underlying the conditions surrounding creative industries in each. Within the second year of the project, out of more than 60 practices identified, 9 were defined as most inspiring and best suitable to be adapted in other regions, coming from The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Romania and Italy . To share the knowledge of these practices, interregional seminars have taken place in Nottingham (UK), Treviso (IT), Arnhem (NL) and Iais (RO) for Organza project partners and local stakeholders. The actual adaption of the selected practices within regions has already begun within pilot actions focusing on Entrepreneurship, Networking, Financial Instruments, Crossovers and Urban Upgrading. Within the first half of 2012 most of the pilot activities have already taken place and whilst the pilots will round up in the second half of 2012, the first pilot spin offs are already starting to emerge, such as a plan to deploy financial instruments to support creative industries in the East Netherlands.