Kickstarting the Creative/Cultural Industries track - A short story from Italy

[matteo_uguzzoni]

I moved to Milan (Italy) 5 years ago, tired of working in city planning (my background is in architecture) and decided on doing something more creative and with an impact in the society.

My first chance was in a project called CriticalCity Upload, an urban transformation game, that i developed with a  friend (and now a partner in all my professional adventures) @Augusto_Pirovano. We started with a cultural fund, we design and put online the project, we hit some success, and we find a way to keep alive the project for 4 years, instead of 1 (the only funded).

Business model and revenues weren’t a thing to pay attention:

“Who cares, we are having an impact, somewhere we will find a way to survive!”

Our business model became a split one, from one side we were developing games and experiences with impact on people’s lives, mostly based on cultural funding, public tenders with a cyclic trend (design the project / get the fund /realize the project / close the project / wait / starve / design a project /and so on…), on the other side it ended up that our only way to pay the bills was to do consultancy works for companies, some of which we were “fighting” with our social game actions.

Overtime we didn’t properly value (except from the know-how) our previous experiences, and after every project we have to dismantle our small company (and lose amazing people) in order to survive without fixed costs and start again looking for new tenders.

I’m not saying that is only an environmental issue, but it’s hard, especially here, to find a company that can survive, in the cultural field, without a continuous help from the public sector.

Long story short.

Last year we finally decided to move to a business model ticket based:

“Let’s ask the money to the people that already loves us!”

We started an acceleration process and we found some (again private) fund to start our new cultural company.

The idea was to create the Urban Games’s Pixar, in Italy (here is a presentation).

It ended up that after our first production (a very good looking one ) we run (crazily) out of money and the project is now in standby mode.

Again, we made a lot of mistakes (hell yeah), but somehow I think that cultural and creative industries are by definition on the edge of innovation (and they go further sometimes), so how can we find a right balance to try > fail  > (but still) survive?

And overall, which kind of ways do you see in the next years that will run in this field?

(e.g. Andrew Missingham told me in a workshop that Music had 5 revenue model, now just one is still working and it’s Live Events).

Do you have stories from which we can see how cultural and creative industries are evolving in your country, and if there are models that can be replicated?

But what i’m interested the most is to hear from your failure, as pioneers and gold-diggers i think we have to develop an obsession from maps (designed on failures) that can help us to imagine what is still unexplored.

Of course this is my narrow point of view and the topic is wide and wild, so please feel free to add your story or suggestions or propose a session. Just post here or write me an email matteo@focuscoop.it.

Thanks again,

ciao!

[alberto]

Matera?

@matteo_uguzzoni, your story is a story of shifting sands. You do stuff, but conditions rearrange themselves around you in a way that prevents you from really capitalising on your own development.

And there is a great great story of failure that many of us know from up close: how the Italian city of Matera built a successful bid to become European Capital of Culture in 2019… only for its plan to become the object of a takeover attempt by some local politicians. The takeover was at the very least partly successful. A lot of social capital and many, many months of work from highly dedicated people were dissipated.

@idaleone can tell this story like no other, maybe partnering up with @ilariadauria (a local from Brussels, flawless English and French). And I think it is a story that needs telling with the candor of Fuckup Nights.

On a more general level, when @noemi and I did a bit of digging, it turned out this is pretty much the norm. Most European Capitals of Culture fail. Most fail in this very way. @nadia has proposed inviting Robert Palmer, Europe’s most senior policy consultant; Bob is the person most qualified to tell this story in gory detail, but he coming to LOTE5 is kind of a long shot. I guess it does not hurt to ask.

[noemi]

It’s not just you or Italy

From the little that I’ve worked in the Romanian cultural sector or with veterans inside it, it’s pretty clear that the grant funding model via the public sector is broken because it doesn’t help grow companies, it helps to some extent survival through struggle. @Raluca_Iacob_Pop and @Cosmin are two of the people who have a lot of lessons to share, and hearing those fail stories is disheartening. Raluca do you still have your presentation from Futurespotters workshop? It’s worth revisiting…

Perhaps in the creative industries more than in culture, one model beginning to take shape locally, perhaps following Berlin’s and other cities with delay, is re-conversion of industrial heritage in joint ventures: creative hubs or venues for events, through mostly private financing. Large, spacious, contemporary designed, multipurpose, and quite hip - they’re a basis for birthing smaller businesses inside, especially in design and architecture.