Christoph Backes

Christoph Backes is an economist, business consultant and stage actor. He is project manager of the Kompetenzzentrum, director of the u-institut and worked as founding director of the GründerZentrum Kulturwirtschaft Aachen (2004-2005). For more than 10 years, Christoph Backes establishes entrepreneurial orientation in the cultural and creative industries: for students, universities, funding institutions, politics, ventures in cultural and creative industries as well as middle class and industrialism. The aim of his work is to strengthen the confidence of various interest groups in effective and feasible paths for the work with cultural and creative industries and thus, generating more wealth.

Since 2008, he advices the Initiative Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft of the German government. In consultation meetings he aims to ask the right (including the uncomfortable) questions – of course striving for promising understandings of his client. Christoph Backes is lecturer at various universities in Germany and Switzerland and author of diverse studies and reports in the area of cultural and creative industries. Furthermore, he drafted Germany’s first Kulturwirtschaftsbericht for the city of Aachen in 2006.

Today, among many other projects, he realizes the annual award Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland for the Initiative Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft of the German government. Christoph Backes was head of marketing at the first Ruhrtriennale and went on tour with Chansonnier Tim Fischer as lighting designer.

[2016]