Launching (g)local level heritage entrepreneurship: strategies and tools to unite forces, safeguard the place, mobilize cultural values, deliver the experience.
Cultural consumption is a knowledge based activity: cultural products and services are viable, only if they possess widely recognized values. SAGITTARIUS advances cultural consumption by communicating cultural values: from natural monuments and ecosystems to sites and collections, from the arts to traditions and handicrafts. Thus values of tangible-intangible, movable-immovable and spiritual heritage assets become catalysts for regeneration and development by being revealed and communicated. Given the diversity and complexity of heritage, the use of cultural values for development is feasible, only if multilateral interactions are understood and reflected in policy and delivery. Required is a multivalent and flexible nexus at local-global level to mitigate the protection-use conflict reconciling national and international strategies. SAGITTARIUS provides the Cooperation Area with an activity mix to fully realize the socioeconomic potential of culture: put into practice is an integrative management system to classify and signify natural, man made and spiritual heritage assets and communicate their values to different audiences across the SEE. To promote entrepreneurial culture in the heritage sector, SAGITTARIUS encourages the formation of heritage entrepreneurs: a participatory knowledge platform transfers advanced tools among multilevel actors to protect and use heritage assets by identifying their environmental, social, historic, aesthetic, spiritual and special values; domain specific training certifies individuals with increased capacities certifying professional skills. Implemented pilot actions on a social inclusion basis, provide for cultural experience diversity connecting thus local cultural production to international markets. By activating public-private-third sector alliances, heritage entrepreneurship is established at transnational level, exemplifying, how heritage is valued, protected, communicated and used with ecologic, economic and social profit.