The global pandemic is changing the world in significantly high speed and in many dimensions-economic, social, cultural, digital. Covid-19 certainly had a negative effect on all sectors requiring traveling and physical presence, including many arts and culture events and organisations, as well as sectors that are complementary to the culture and creative industries value chain. Despite, the global pandemic opened up new opportunities of living more among our communities, consuming more local products, reorganising our life to be more resilient, catalyzing both business and social innovations, using much more digital and online tools, including also for further increase of cultural participation and democratisation of the arts. In the last few months we have received plenty of evidences worldwide that culture does contribute to the economic and social vitality of cities across the world. This paper aims to identify the essence and key characteristics of "creative clusters" (CCs) and to offer a typology of their diverse forms of existence. It also summarises key business models and sources of external financial support for development of CCs. Finally, the paper draws key success factors for their development. The research for elaboration of this paper was done during 3-months long period (April-June 2020) in collaboration with Nikoloz Nadirashvili and Creative Georgia, within the framework of the Project - "Designing a Creative Cluster Ecosystem in Georgia" under the support of UNESCO and the European Commission. The research methods used for elaboration of this paper are: desk research of documents and publications, mapping and analysis of diverse cases and targeted in depth interviews with professionals and managers running creative clusters.
Creative clusters: Typology, characteristics, financial models and success factors