Linking place brands and regional innovation: sustainable business strategies leveraging heritage
以意大利普拉托纺织区的一家奢侈时尚企业为例，研究企业如何通过地方品牌吸收和重组符号知识，实施遗产驱动的可持续创新战略，连接地方品牌与区域创新。
This paper cross-fertilizes regional innovation and place branding studies using the firm as the focal point of theoretical and empirical exploration. It explores how business innovation strategies connect place brands and regional innovation dynamics and highlights the role of place brands in symbolic knowledge exchange and co-production. The sustainability-oriented innovation strategy of a luxury fashion firm (Rifò) in the Prato textile district of Tuscany, Italy, is analysed. The firm’s place brand appropriation assists symbolic knowledge absorption, interpretation and recombination with synthetic knowledge. The place brand supports the firm’s operationalization of a context-specific, distinctive, actionable heritage-driven innovation approach to sustainability. Place brand formation results from the firm’s recodification of local heritage into novel place meanings and images.