The creative and cultural sectors and industries are mainly made of networks of freelancers and microenterprises, with very few medium-sized companies. Their economic performance, problems, and innovation capacities are hidden. Our open collaboration to create this data observatory is committed to change this. Relying on modern data science, the re-use of open governmental data, open science data, and novel harmonized data collection we aim to fill in the gaps left in the official statistics of the European Union.