Creative Industries Fund NL

The Creative Industries Fund NL began operating on 1 January 2013. It operates within the context of the Dutch government’s culture policy and focuses on all the designing disciplines and on E-culture in a broad sense.

Creative Industries Fund NL is the Dutch cultural fund for architecture, design and digital culture, as well as every imaginable crossover. 
The Fund strives to make a substantial contribution to the quality of professional design practice within and especially between the disciplines of architecture, design and digital culture. Part of this endeavour is the interdisciplinary interplay between the cultural, social and economic domains. The Fund supports exceptional and innovative projects and activities of designers, makers and cultural institutions in the creative industries.

The aim of all the grants and programmes is to enrich the creative sector and through cooperation to strive towards a culture- and knowledge-driven creative economy. The Fund promotes the production and presentation of architecture, design and digital culture from the Netherlands at home and abroad. At the same time the Fund contributes to the formulation of broadly supported design solutions for societal issues through its grants and programmes. 

The Fund has an annual budget of about €15 million. The greatest portion of this budget comes from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), complemented by a budget from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BuZa) for internationalization, and a budget from the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment (IenM) for three stimulation programmes − Innovative Forms of Commissioning, Healthcare Environments and Education Environments − within the Action Agenda for Spatial Design (Actieagenda Ruimtelijk Ontwerp). This means that the Fund is operating within several policy contexts. It supports hundreds of projects in the Netherlands and beyond every year. The Fund employs 25 members of staff and is advised by more than 100 experts in its evaluation of applications. The executive director is advised by a selection committee of three members for the nomination of new committee members.