Piedad Rivas

European Commission at the Executive Agency for Small & Medium-sized enterprises for the EU COSME programme

Piedad Rivas

European Commission at the Executive Agency for Small & Medium-sized enterprises for the EU COSME programme

Biography

Piedad enjoys working with creative industries and creative minds, and is a great believer in interdisciplinary collaboration, the richness of connecting people and skills, and the magic resulting from it. She is convinced about the great potential that creativity and European creative industries have as a driving force for innovation and to bring positive changes into European society, lifestyle and culture.

Piedad has a background in Law and further specialisation studies in Human Right Law. She is currently working at the European Commission at the Executive Agency for Small & Medium-sized enterprises for the EU COSME programme, through which the European Union (EU) supports competitiveness and innovation of European SMEs.

She is dealing with creative industries in the area of fashion, design, and lifestyle in the industry sectors of textile and clothing, footwear and leather and accessorises and design based consumer goods.

Since 2000 she has been working in different European Commission services in international cooperation and development. Within this assignment she spent two years in Beijing at the European Union (EU) Delegation to China.

In 2010, through the EU MEDIA Programme, she became familiar with the challenges of creative industries, business & creative minds in the film and audio-visual industry.

The European Commission (EC) supports creative industries and creative minds and talents in many ways. It supports projects driven by and for designers, starts ups, innovative manufacturing companies and tech people and talents to upscale these results into the market. It also supports high-tech cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration to engage designers with techies and engineering minds and the industry to discuss new concepts and ideas, to develop common standards and to implement innovative projects for instance on smart wearables and e-textiles.

To know more about How the European Union supports creativity, creative industries and creative minds through the fusion between fashion, tech & design, arts & craft, & innovation join me at the main stage in focus Day 2.