Scaling the Next Wave of Creative Industry Giants

The session will explore how the UK can better connect innovation, industry demand, and commercial opportunity to scale the next generation of globally significant creative companies. Gary Cutts will introduce Innovate UK’s strategic direction and the emerging “Next Wave” approach, before moving into a conversation with a leading industry voice from the creative economy on how challenge-led innovation, partnerships, and new routes to market can help ambitious creative SMEs grow and compete globally.

Partner: Innovate UK

Unlocking Adaptive Spaces with Total Experience Design

Cultural infrastructure, sports stadiums and commercial developments need to be more adaptable than ever before to connect to the broadest range of audiences and maximise the return of investment. But a new approach is needed to develop transformative experiences for them. This talk will highlight the incredible opportunity for these sectors and share a new model to better develop the experiences that will drive them forward.

Partner: Interval / Alex Wills

Fashion in Gaming: Building the Gaming IP Distribution Layer for Fashion

Fashion is locked out of gaming. Every garment a brand creates gets rebuilt three to five times to reach a single game, weeks of work, thousands of dollars, and the cultural moment is gone before it lands. A $180B market that fashion can barely reach, and where brand IP gets lost the moment it leaves the studio. Alvalan is changing that. We've built the infrastructure that turns a sketch into a game-ready wearable in minutes, the same standardising role Spotify plays for music, but for fashion in gaming. And we're doing it in a way that protects and authenticates brand IP automatically as it moves from design to deployment.In this session, watch it happen live. Founder and CEO Louise Laing will demo the platform on stage, turning a fashion sketch into a deployable Roblox asset in real time. She'll share the technology behind it, AI-driven caging, rigging and weight painting and how Alvalan is enabling brands to scale into gaming with their IP protected, automated, and earning at every step.It's colourful, it's fast, and it's a category being built in the UK in real time.We want to make fashion in gaming open to everyone and to give brands the tools to own it.Come and see how.

Partner: Phygital

Deconstructing IP: The Cake Theory of Music, Film & Sports — From Cultural Ideas to Tradeable Global Assets.

Deconstructing IP: The Cake Theory of Music, Film & Sports — From Cultural Ideas to Tradeable Global Assets is a visually led masterclass that uses the Cake Theory framework to make IP accessible, memorable and commercially legible across music, film and sports. The session shows how ideas are structured, owned, monetised and expanded, then connects that understanding directly to trade: how properly packaged rights become licensable, financeable and export-ready assets. For Africa, the focus is on turning creative abundance into structured export value through better rights clarity, packaging and global market access. For the wider world, including markets such as India, Japan, South Korea and Brazil, the focus is on how the UK can serve as a hub for structuring, financing and scaling globally relevant cultural IP.

Partner: Fela Oke

How Black Founders are redefining the Creative Economy

Digital Catapult’s Black Founders Programme, delivered in partnership with Sony Music and, most recently, Channel 4, has run for three years and supported over 30 Black-founded creative technology companies, with 10 alumni collectively raising more than £1.9 million in funding. This session brings together programme alumni and programme sponsors to explore how the creative economy is being redefined in practice. Through founder journeys, the session will highlight what is being built, the realities of raising funding, and the challenges of navigating the creative technology landscape as underrepresented founders. It will also examine the role institutions must play to better support and scale diverse talent, and how targeted programmes can drive long-term, systemic change across the industry.

Partner: Digital Catapult

Immersion at Scale: Designing the Next Generation of Experiences

The experience economy is booming*, reshaping how audiences engage with culture, entertainment, and each other. From immersive theatre to next-generation theme parks, designers are blending art, technology, and storytelling to create worlds that audiences don’t just watch, they step inside. This panel brings together the creators behind some of the UK’s most ambitious large-scale immersive environments. They’ll explore how these experiences are conceived, built, and delivered at scale, unpacking the creative, technical, and audience challenges along the way. Why Bristol? Because it’s quietly become a powerhouse for immersive innovation, where media technology, festival culture, and creative talent collide to produce globally recognised work. Join us to discover how the next generation of experiences is being designed and what it means for the future of audiences everywhere. *Barclays estimate the experience economy at £130Bn+, and growing at 2.6% p.a.

Partner: MyWorld

Arts Council England Music Mixer at UK House, SXSW London, by invitation only

Join Arts Council England for our SXSW London music networking mixer with live performances from Karma Sheen and Desta French. Presented by Arts Council England, British Underground and UK House

Partner: British Underground

The Unspoken: An Evening of Female Founders, Wellness & Real Conversation, by invitation only

The Unspoken is a special evening bringing together female founders, business owners and entrepreneurs to connect, share honestly and champion the things that don't get talked about enough. This is an invite-only gathering of women who build things, who take risks, who create, who find solutions and who lead. And it's a space to have the real, unscripted conversations about women's wellness – spanning menopause, cancer recovery, confidence, intimacy and more – all issues that so often stay in the shadows. Because these things affect how women show up in business, in life and in leadership. And pretending they don't exist doesn't help anyone. The event will be co-hosted by Shalom Lloyd MBE, Founder of Naturally Tiwa and Elizabeth Anyaegbuna, Founder of Buna Street Collective.

Partner: Body Shop