Scientific Track

Following the successful implementation of the conference "Culture meets Economy" in June 2007, the European Academy Bozen/Bolzano and the Innsbruck University initialized a Scientific Track for the Culture meets Economy Conference, taking place on June, 11th - 12th 2008 (11/06/08: Scientific Track; 12/06/08: Symposium).

The first conference addressed the potential of cultural events for tourism and concluded with two theses on approaching the relationship between culture and economy. First of all, culture and arts broaden one´s horizon and secondly, dealing with culture and arts as indicator for future developments, can foster entrepreneurial innovation and open up new markets.

Based upon these tenets, the upcoming conference will focus on culture and creativity as lo-cation factors, placing the non-metropolitan areas in the centre of attention.

The Scientific Track offers a platform for academics and researchers to present and debate state-of-the-art research on the importance of culture and creativity, which are deemed to play a significant role in innovation and social as well as economic regional development. The Scientific Track provides researchers from different disciplines the opportunity to create interdisciplinary net-works and co-operations.

Conference topics
The Scientific Track of the conference will address various topics on intersection between culture, creativity and economy, with special focus on culture and creativity as location fac-tors:

• Cultural initiatives and activities as facilitator for innovation and competition
• Cultural clusters
• Creative milieu and its location requirements
• Cultural branding
• Culture and management
• Cultural entrepreneurs
• Culture and tourism

As most of the research carried out within this field is dealing with metropolitan areas, authors are invited to draw special attention to non-metropolitan areas and/or address potential differences between rural and metropolitan areas.