Creative Business Workshops .
This workshop programme, presented by York Business School, runs alongside the UNESCO EXPO as part of the BAFTA-Qualifying Aesthetica Film Festival, bringing together creative practitioners, SMEs, producers, and emerging talent with a shared focus: building a stronger, scalable creative industries economy. The UK Government’s Industrial Strategy and Creative Industries Sector Plan position the sector as a major engine of future growth, exports, and regional regeneration. Film, television, games, digital media, and content-led businesses are increasingly expected to create cultural value while operating as investable, export-ready enterprises. Yet many organisations remain constrained by supply chains, short-term project funding, and limited access to business development support. The EXPO and workshops are free to attend and do not require a festival pass, ensuring open access for the creative ecosystem.
Thursday
Creative Enterprise Growth Pathways
5 November | 14:00-15:00
This session explores how value is created, distributed, and captured across creative industries. Participants map their own activity within the wider supply chain – from development and production through to distribution . The focus is on identifying where value is lost and where new opportunities can be unlocked through smarter positioning, partnerships, and rights ownership. Hosted by Giorgio Fazio, Research Director of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre at Newcastle University.
Innovation Practise & Investment Readiness
5 November | 11:00-12:00
This session is led by Emma Cooper, Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Manager at Innovate UK. It maps the funding ecosystem across the creative industries, including public funding, private finance, co-production, and hybrid models. Participants explore what makes a business investment-ready, including financial planning, scalability and risk management. The workshop helps creatives be able to efficiently align projects with the right funding routes and also strengthen their investment narratives.
Pitching & Winning Business
5 November | 12:00-13:00
This workshop from Alison Grade, founder of Mission Accomplished Ltd, who help creative concepts become business realities, focuses on turning creative ideas into commission-ready propositions. Participants learn how to structure pitches, assemble meaningful packaging elements, and align projects with investor and commissioner expectations. The session also explores what “deal readiness” means in practice – beyond creative quality – focusing on clarity, positioning, and commercial logic.
Intellectual Property as a Growth Asset
5 November | 13:00-14:00
This session positions IP as the core financial asset of the creative economy. Amanda Goddard, Chief Legal and Commercial Officer at Argonon, breaks down ownership, rights structures, licensing, and exploitation pathways across multiple formats and territories. Participants learn how to shift from single-project thinking to long-term asset development, building portfolios of work that generate value across multiple markets and platforms while strengthening commercial resilience and strategic growth.
Scaling Internationally & Export Growth
5 November | 14:00-15:00
This session, led by Ameeta Virk and Adam Butterworth of the Department for Business & Trade, focuses on how creative businesses move from local success to international markets. It covers global distribution strategies, export readiness, cultural adaptation, and market entry barriers. Participants explore how to position their work for international buyers, platforms, and commissioners, and how to build sustainable cross-border revenue streams while developing stronger commercial partnerships.
Reignite XVII: Culture as Infrastructure, Stories as Power
5 November | 18:00-21:00
Reignite XVII brings together the UK’s UNESCO Creative Cities in York for a landmark gathering at the intersection of climate, attention, and narrative power. The event hosts a panel discussion with representatives from the cities of Bradford, Edinburgh, Exeter, Liverpool and Nottingham as well as insightful talks given by speakers from Aberystwyth, Glasgow, Manchester and Perth. Hear about their impact on the cultural ecosystem of the UK and the way the creative arts is shaping the UK economy.
Friday
Building Sustainable Creative Businesses
6 November | 10:00-11:00
This workshop, led by Carol Bell, Creative UK’s Regional Associate Director, North, focuses on moving from fragmented freelance work to long-term, structured, resilient creative enterprises. It covers business models, revenue diversification, pricing strategies, and operational systems. The session will also integrate collaboration thinking, showing how shared infrastructure, partnerships, and collective working models strengthen long-term sustainability and reduce risk across the sector.
Co-Production Models & Strategic Partnerships
6 November | 12:00-13:00
This workshop goes deeper into how co-production actually works in practice across film, TV, and digital content. Hosted by Iris Cohen who is the Head of Production at the company Head Gear Films, covers rights sharing, governance structures, financing alignment, and risk distribution. Participants learn how to structure partnerships that go beyond informal collaboration, creating formalised deals that enable larger-scale, higher-value creative projects with greater strategic impact and long-term value.
Collaboration & Creative Clusters
6 November | 11:00-12:00
Caroline Cooper-Charles, Chief Executive at Screen Yorkshire, introduces a session that explores how collaboration drives growth in modern creative economies. Participants examine how clusters, co-production partnerships, and shared infrastructure increase competitiveness, reduce costs, and unlock new opportunities. The workshop provides practical tools for identifying partners, building trust-based networks, and structuring collaborations that deliver mutual value and long-term sector development.
Audience Development & Demand Signals
6 November | 13:00-14:00
This workshop is delivered by PACT, the UK screen sector trade body for independent production and distribution companies across film, TV and digital media. It explores the current landscape of the screen industry, examining the challenges and opportunities ahead and the trends shaping its future. Participants will gain practical insight into how the sector is evolving and what this means for creative businesses. It also highlights practical strategies for navigating change and identifying new opportunities for growth.
Creative Enterprise Growth Pathways
6 November | 14:00-15:00
This final workshop from Pip Rymill, Accelerator Community Manager at Natwest, brings the programme together into a strategic growth framework. Participants map how value creation, audience development, IP, funding, collaboration, and export all connect into a single growth system. The focus of this workshop is on long-term scaling, diving into building creative businesses that are investable, exportable, and most importantly structurally resilient within a global creative economy.
Networking: Powering Creativity
6 November | 18:00-19:00
This event, held in partnership with York Business School, bridges creativity and commerce, welcoming professionals from diverse sectors. After visiting the UNESCO City of Media Arts EXPO, at 18.00, head to York Theatre Royal and enjoy a free drink, whilst exploring fresh strategies for innovation, expansion and sustainable growth. Gain valuable insights, build collaborations that will drive the industry forward and start connections that can generate new ideas and help bring new projects to life.