The complexity of the contemporary world, combined with the social needs of increasing portions of population, puts on the table new issues to address. In a context characterised by high degrees of competitiveness and few stocks of monetary and natural resources, enterprises and cultural organisations, in particular, have to face a growing number of challenges in order to survive.
The global society’s state of art points out a huge variety of common weaknesses and structural threats that makes hard to imagine a better future. The current scenario speaks about museums at risk – considering, for example, the case of Detroit Institute of Arts which is very close to sell off its artworks to pay for a city’s general debt -; culture budget cuts from local authorities, which means that arts companies could lose their funding completely; downsizing plans, as it is happening to Bloomberg where the brand of cultural journalism is being shut down or to Australia’s major classical music magazine that may close; crisis in the humanities and social sciences, seen as “luxuries” or “a waste of time” and beaten by scientific faculties.
All of these reasons must result in the creation of new markets capable of overcoming the logic of production of the traditional type, based on the supremacy of the profit and on a clear separation between economic goals and social variables. Today we need unpublished protocols of action and new rules of the game, in order to allow the entrance of new players that are able to use the newly established operating procedures, dealing with a large and diverse variety of subjects and areas.
Keeping this concept in mind, several researchers and practitioners have started to design, develop and promote new approaches to funding cultural entities in order to create jobs opportunities for young people; to stimulate the birth of new businesses – more sustainable and able to fill the empty space of traditional manufacturing sectors – and to spread best practices and original solutions implemented by micro-enterprises and start-ups, through information exchange and cross-fertilisation processes.
In this respect, the innovative financial instruments described by Pierpaolo Spertingati represent a useful set of tools and services which will help the cultural sector to be attractive to the accurate investors and to increase the amount of capital available to these organisations, helping them to reach their social and cultural ends.
At the same time, the combination of multiple sectors and skills, as well as the adoption of new technologies, can help cultural organisations to expand their markets and to meet the needs of an evolving demand. The use of Augmented Reality to create artworks, as stated by Monika Rut and Arthur Clay, provides new ways of consume and communicate culture and the arts, exploring unusual platforms and offering a strong interaction with the audience.
Therefore it becomes essential to implement a broader modality of action much more complex than the traditional one, which include a huge set of different elements such as infrastructure, technology, in-kind services, developing collaborative tools that allow participation and exchange of ideas among citizens and cultural companies.
