8 Impact Areas

In the post-copyright digital era, in line with the increasingly open-source ethics debate (Fraser et al., 2021) and with the apparent dismantling of the binary creator/public, the users’ active participation in product-related content creation is strategic in the restructuring of digitally-driven content industries. This new entrepreneurial culture has indeed a strong generational identification: the Millennials, Generation Z and C as digital users are naturally familiar with co-creation practices and there is great demand for new digital innovation-driven business models. New technologies can be an ultimate form of empowerment when, in dialogue with the most traditional forms of cultural access, paving the way for innovative crossovers: we can see how, for instance, new job positions are flourishing, such as augmented-reality makeup artists that create face filters for social media, and how the increase in reading books, during and after the pandemic, has been directly related with the increase in listening to tales and stories via audio-books and podcasts. Moreover, in the Digital Fashion Technology sector, digital users are often involved in product co-creation by providing their perspectives about their own body-shape fit and product design preferences. Furthermore, an increasing trend regards the case of co-auteurism the tv or web-series writing: the role of the writer and the viewer has become not only blurry but overlapping, giving rise to a  structured negotiation between the producers and the fan base involved in the production, releasing and broadcasting of audio-visual materials. In light of these trends, how can the digital dimension of CHIs become an effective powerful channel of access and participation in culture for their community of users? We are not only referring to websites but also to participative platforms which become the most important social networks and may be a sounding board for CHIs’ cultural activities, to engage and stimulate the active participation of their users, whether the CHIs management reflects the 3.0 model of co-creation and co-authorship of the digital heritage re-use and production. In this sense, the power of cultural participation in digital cultural production can really give the chance for the CHIs to be a powerful incubator for new forms of entrepreneurship.