Tourism, cultural, and creative industries face increasing pressure to reconcile economic viability with environmental responsibility, social inclusion, and cultural integrity.
The book responds to the urgent need for innovative, research-based, and practice-oriented approaches to tackle the vulnerabilities and challenges of today's business environment. It advances strategies that integrate sustainability into both business and place development, building on the principles of circularity, inclusivity and participation, authenticity, and regeneration. By linking theory and practice, the volume provides a roadmap for transitioning businesses and places toward sustainability, enhancing resilience to external shocks while strengthening their positive impact on communities and the environment.
Maria Della Lucia is full professor at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento
Erica Santini is associate professor at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento
Andrea Caputo is full professor at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento
Fabrizio Panozzo is associate professor at the Venice School of Management, Ca' Foscary University
From Introductory Chapter (pagg. 1-12) and Chapter 10 (pagg. 181-195)
This edited book marks the collective outcome of a three-year project developed within the Tourism, Culture, and Creative Industries network (Spoke 6) of the Interconnected Nord-Est Innovation Ecosystem. It captures the results of a shared research process involving universities, public research institutions, territorial bodies, companies, and practitioners, and reflects the maturation of a collaborative effort to advance sustainable business models and innovation in tourism, culture, and the creative industries. The volume synthesizes this collective work and contributes to the international debate on sustainability, innovation, and regional development.
This volume offers a critical rethinking of Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) in tourism, cultural, and creative sectors, domains in which value creation is inseparable from place, culture, social relations, and ecological systems. It takes a clear stance against dominant, firm-centric interpretations of sustainability, which continue to shape much of mainstream management research and policy discourse. In these approaches, sustainability is typically framed as a matter of optimizing business model performance by improving internal efficiency, reducing negative externalities, fostering scalability, or aligning business performance with standardized metrics and reporting requirements. While such strategies may reduce harm, they rarely question the underlying logics of value creation, growth, or extraction that generate unsustainability in the first place and reproduce unsustainable development paths. This paradigm is particularly inadequate for tourism, cultural, and creative sectors, which are structurally relational, place-dependent, and socially embedded. In these contexts, value is co-produced with living heritage, communities, ecosystems, and, often, with public and third-sector actors. Treating sustainability as an internal organizational optimization problem, therefore, risks overlooking power asymmetries, processes of cultural commodification, social exclusion, and the progressive erosion of local ecological, social, and cultural systems.
The book argues that in tourism and in the cultural and creative industries (CCIs), sustainability foregrounds plural forms of value - economic, social, cultural, ecological, and relational - and raises fundamental questions about who defines value, who benefits from it, and who bears the costs. Sustainability is thus reframed as value reconfiguration within a collective, negotiated, and ethical process. On this basis, the book is structured around four interconnected pillars that together form an integrated framework for rethinking SBMs:
1. Circular and inclusive business models. Sustainability is approached through two complementary lenses, i.e., resource regeneration and social justice, illustrating how circular economy principles can be embedded in service systems, and how cultural and tourism experiences can be intentionally designed to enhance accessibility and inclusivity.
2. Art-based business models and authenticity of place. Sustainability is approached through artistic practices and cultural production, understood as strategic resources for generating meaning, identity, and long-term value, while resisting processes of commodification and cultural extraction.
3. Participatory business models and shared value creation. Sustainability is approached through participation and collaboration, where community-based enterprises, social innovation networks, and shared governance models enable value to be co-created with territories and local communities.
4. Regenerative business models for place development. Sustainability is approached through regenerative development, moving beyond conservation to treat places - urban, rural, marginal, or post-industrial - as living systems capable of renewal over time.
Across these pillars, particular attention is paid to authenticity as an active and contested practice, inclusion as a design principle rather than a corrective measure, and participation as a form of governance that redistributes agency among communities, organisations, and institutions.What makes this book distinctive is its ability to rethink SBMs in the tourism, cultural, and creative industries, where they actually take shape: in places, communities, and everyday practices. It draws on a multidisciplinary, research-based approach to reconfigure how value is created in informal, relational, and deeply embedded contexts, hybridity, and fragmentation. It adopts an open approach to research, combining qualitative, participatory, and art-based methods: research is treated as a collaborative process that connects scholars, practitioners, and communities, and supports learning and change rather than simply documenting existing practices. Finally, it is grounded in concrete, place-based experiences, mainly from Northeast Italy, to illustrate how sustainable business models emerge in real contexts. These cases speak to an international audience without losing their territorial specificity.
A key contribution is the emphasis on recurring patterns that emerge from the book’s four thematic sections, revealing how the long-term impact of SBMs can be sustained in tourism, culture, and creative industries from an ecosystem perspective. SBM practice demonstrates a growing shift toward flexible and adaptive organizational structures, a pragmatic integration of market dynamics with cultural and social values, a strong emphasis on place-based identity and community engagement, and an increasing focus on regenerative and inclusive practices. SBMs that rely on project-based and networked structures and embrace bricolage as a legitimate and strategic logic can operate under uncertainty, mobilize limited resources, and respond to changing local conditions. In tourism and cultural and creative sectors, adaptability supports experimentation, cross-sector collaboration, and long-term resilience without imposing premature scaling or formalization. SBMs that balance economic viability with cultural integrity and social purpose support cultural production, social innovation, and community well-being, while preserving income generation, autonomy, and ethical commitments. By grounding value creation in local identities, and social relations, these models strengthen trust, legitimacy, and continuity while countering cultural commodification and actively renew social, cultural, and ecological systems, broadening access, participation, and shared benefits over time.From a holistic perspective, these patterns suggest that SBMs function as connective mechanisms that align values, actors, and resources over time. Long-term sustainability emerges through interdependencies, dynamic feedback loops, and shared infrastructures, balancing coherence and openness. Coherence, in this context, refers to the alignment of purpose, a shared understanding of systemic goals, and coordinated efforts that provide stability and direction for innovation. Openness, conversely, requires ongoing engagement with diverse local knowledge, cross-sector experimentation, and continuous learning across institutional boundaries, ensuring adaptability and receptiveness to change. SBMs navigate the inherent tension between coherence and openness, mediating between existing structures and emergent opportunities, and between the granular realities of local contexts and the sweeping forces of systemic transformation. In doing so, they connect system-level aspirations with organizational practice, and align policy goals with entrepreneurial agency and community values. SBMs can drive, steer, and adapt to the demands of complex regional systems through their deeper, synergistic engagement with digital technologies, data analytics, and narrative strategies championed by the other research streams of the project. Their interplay reflects the mutualistic logic that defines mature regional ecosystems, where diverse actors synergistically create collective value through coordinated efforts and strategic specialization.
This book speaks to researchers and students interested in sustainability, tourism, culture, and creative industries who seek approaches that go beyond standardized models and metrics. It offers practitioners and cultural entrepreneurs actionable insights for designing business models that reconcile economic viability with social, cultural, and ecological value. Finally, it provides policymakers and public institutions engaged in regional development with evidence on how SBMs can generate long-term, place-based impact within innovation ecosystems.
This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) and is available on the Publisher page