The usual way to justify meaningful/valuable contributions of CCIs is about contributions to the GDP, growth and employments (O’ Hagan 2016). The social and cultural qualities (values) of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have always been relevant.

However, still policies are designed based on economic arguments – or economic outcomes of the CCIs. Recently, the awareness of cultural and social relevance is growing. Societies all around the world need more cohesion, more solidarity, more trust, and more identity.

And we need an adequate measure of the social and cultural contributions of CCIs.  We follow in these well-established institutions like the World Bank, OECD and European Union which all have concluded that there is a need of new measures that adequately capture the vast diversity of contributions to the well-being of the citizens. For example, convinced that the traditional measures of impact as GDP, employment rates, etc. fail to capture sustainable economic and social development, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched in 2011 a “Better life index”. The latter includes measures which are difficult to measure such as life satisfaction and social belonging, quality of the built environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging (Gregory et al. 2009). Most of these variables represents certain values.