Crafting cultural clusters. Looking at cultural enterpreneurship to make sense of creativity-led development

Culture is a key word in the story of Italy. The richness of its cultural past together with the present and future potential of its creativity have given culture a central role in the agenda of public policies. As a new element in this pattern, most recently “culture” has been increasingly and explicitly combined with the notion of competitiveness. The relationship between the two words is mediated by the creative process and seems to evoke a new model of economic development based on the attempt to govern the economy through a careful use of culture as a key dimension. This connection looks at the territory as the context where cultural processes can be encouraged, and used to transform the economy. The paper offers a critical review of the literature on cultural cluster and on culture as a key dimension of economic development identifying cultural entrepreneurship as a phenomenon to investigate in order to enter more deeply in the question of culture-led development .