| Abstract |
Purpose - In the time of globalization, growing uncertainty, ambiguity and change, traditional ways of doing business are no longer sufficient for sustainable competitive advantages. Nowadays, it is more and more important to consider non-conventional collaborations, methods, approaches and initiatives to release and apply creativity in order to facilitate and develop organizational innovation capacity. Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) in this prospect can represent a source and resource of critical and creative thinking as well as a set of processes to be deployed in order to foster and support innovation. In this view, the collaboration between CCI and traditional businesses can represent a strategic and operational approach to develop cross-innovations enhancing organizational value creation capacity. Sharing the assumption that the adoption and the integration of creative processes can produce positive impacts on organizational processes and business performance, this paper provides the results of a scoping study exploring how traditional businesses can engage or deploy culture and creativity in order to support the development of their innovation capacity. Focusing on a sample of Italian companies, we have investigated the forms and practices of collaborations between CCI and traditional businesses as well as the scope of these collaborations. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is based on a practical exploration of projects, practices, initiatives aimed to improve innovation capacity of the organizations addressing collaboration between creative and culture industries and traditional business in the Italian context. Using a sample of Italian organizations, we draw first insights about their awareness, perception and orientation to identify, adopt and integrate creativitybased processes and collaboration with the creative and culture organizations to foster their innovation capacity, and to qualitatively identify a feasible set of new approachesand practices potentially driving performance improvement. In particular, the empirical research aimed to find Italian companies within the manufacturing and service areas whose primary business is not to provide experience products and services, but who could benefit from adopting and integrating creative and experience economy in their traditional business activities. In order to derive and test theories, trace causal pathways, explore hypotheses generated by research, researchers have designed and implemented qualitative research methods and conducted investigation mainly based on web-available data, archives and interview-based information. Originality/value - This paper represents one of the first attempts to investigate at practical level the collaboration of CCI and traditional business. The case examples of relevant Italian companies - such as Illy, Unicredit, Furla, Zegna - effectively provide evidences of the impact and modalities of adopting initiatives to shape a creative environment capable of sparking, fostering and developing human potentials and innovation capacity. Practical implications - The investigation of a sample of Italian companies suggests that the focus is mainly on the adoption of creative processes as a way to support the performance achievements of one or more dimensions of the organisational value chain. It appears that most of the attention is focused on collaborations aimed to reinforce company image and reputation, to develop corporate social responsibility and to improve brand recognition. Particularly, great attention is paid on the deployment of creative-and culture-based activities and/or relationships as a marketing and communication approach as well as a way to add intangible value into products and services; while, there is a lack of attention and understanding on the use of the relationships with CCI as an instrument to support organisational development and learning. |
