Case D: The Power of Soft Infrastructure in Influencing Regional Entrepreneurship and Innovativeness

This chapter aims at framing ‘creativity, culture and taste’ as soft aspects of knowledge creation and accumulation, and as drivers of innovativeness, a ‘fertile ground’ for niche specializations for many regions (Camagni and Capello, 2013: 362). Creativity, culture and taste are, in fact, often overlooked in the discourse on innovation in Europe, despite their great potential in geographical contexts that are rich in cultural heritage and cultural diversity. There is a need to reflect on regional innovation and entrepreneurial innovativeness by considering ‘cultural inputs’ (Amin and Thrift, 2007) as impulses to economic value creation. This occurs in cultural industries that, inextricably based on cultural production and consumption, have an economic as well as a cultural presence in contemporary society (Pratt, 2008). As this chapter will show, beyond cultural industries, an enlarging set of entrepreneurs consciously appropriates and recombines cultural inputs in order to enrich and innovate their products and services. In so doing they produce cultural meanings, symbols and aesthetic values that, as we shall see below, may become part of regional cultural heritage.