Case B: Culture-led Urban Regeneration and Brand Building in Alpine Italian Cities

In post-industrial societies the combination of knowledge (Scott, 2010), experience (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and the digital economy (Zuboff and Maxmin, 2002) has made intangibles strategic assets for competitive advantage (Richards, 2011). The growing prevalence of immaterial and symbolic components in all forms of production meets the needs of complex individual personalities, thereby transforming consumption into patterns of experience and learning defined for, and participated in by, the user. The new Internet generation has defined a new capitalism that acts as a multiplier of these processes of dematerialization and symbolic value creation (Scott, 2000). This ‘distributed capitalism’ (Rifkin, 2011) allows organizations and individuals to interact widely and to participate in virtual communities (Funilkul and Chutimaskul, 2009) — in which interactions are not mediated solely by the market (Potts et al., 2008) — and to exchange and co-create knowledge-based resources on a global scale (Cooke and Buckley, 2008). The potential of technological infrastructure (its ubiquity and interactivity) combined with the characteristics of knowledge-based resources (non-rivalry and non-excludability) is increasingly blurring the boundaries between supply and demand in the co-creation of intangibles and multiplying the activities in which their transformation into economic and social value for the sake of individuals, enterprises and places’ growth and well-being can be experienced (Sacco, 2011; Sacco et al., 2013).