Linking place brands and regional innovation: sustainable business strategies leveraging heritage

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 (Rifo) 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.