Dear Colleagues,

Humanity is undergoing a series of economic, political, technological, social, and cultural changes resulting from the global spread of SARS-CoV-2. Against this backdrop, all across the globe, most nations have imposed social distancing policies within their borders, jeopardising in particular the survival of organisations, companies, and industries with a business model focused on social interaction and proximity, as is the case with cultural and creative industries (Laurence and Phillips, 2002), also known collectively as the orange economy.

The orange economy, which revolves around business activities that are highly creative or tied to an area’s cultural heritage, takes on great relevance today as a vehicle to reduce the asymmetries that exist between countries in terms of innovation—particularly in developing regions, where the potential for innovation is not necessarily eminently technological in nature (Howkins, 2001; Peris-Ortiz, Cabrera-Flores, and Serrano-Santoyo, 2019). This potential for innovation is largely the result of the symbolic nature and capacity for differentiation of cultural and creative products (Cabrera-Flores, Peris-Ortiz, and León-Pozo, 2020).

Such has been the prominence of these industries that UNESCO (2004) has promoted a network of creative cities around the world (the UCCN), covering seven fields: crafts and folk art, media arts, film, design, gastronomy, literature, and music. Together, the features that help these industries to boost the sustained, comprehensive development of regions and their impact on quality of life (Castells and Hall, 1994; Florida, 2008) make them an economic driver that must be examined and promoted, not least in atypical environments such as those in which social distancing is required.

It is on this basis that this Special Issue aims to bring together experiences on an international level and foster academic dialogue on practices and strategies within the various industries that make up the orange economy—advertising, architecture, art, design, fashion, film, video games, creative tourism, gastronomy, craft products like beer or wine production with high added value—aimed at ensuring the continuity and adaptation of these industries to the changes occurring in the surrounding environment (Wróblewski et al., 2019), all from different theoretical and methodological approaches framed within a context of social distancing and a new global reality.

In this vein, this Special Issue on the orange economy in the SARS-CoV-2 era seeks to fill a gap in theory relating to cultural and creative industries in the context of crisis. This Special Issue is focused on but not limited to the following topics:

• How are businesses in one or more of the industries mentioned redirecting their strategies under the new social norms and policies that have come with the health crisis?
• What are the characteristics of these new markets, and how are businesses’ distribution chains adapting, especially in terms of contact with different stakeholders?
• How have marketing and commercialisation strategies changed under these new circumstances?
• How are the changes brought by SARS-CoV-2 affecting sustainability?
• How are these changes affecting organisational relationships and cooperation? (share experiences, knowledge creation, best practices);
• How are the changes affecting industries that include artistic creation in their value chain?
• In these circumstances, how are network interaction and collaborative ecosystems affected?
• New work spaces and dynamics in the “new” society;
• The difficulties of social interaction with stakeholders in cultural and creative industries;
• Entrepreneurship in the new context of social distancing;
• New consumption dynamics in the orange economy;
• Resilience and crisis management in cultural and creative entrepreneurs;
• Entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability: toward a new post-pandemic economy.

References

Cabrera-Flores, M. Peris-Ortiz, M. y León-Pozo, A. (2020). Knowledge, innovation, and outcomes in craft beer: Theoretical framework and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, pp. 1-10, 2020. Disponible en: 10.3233/JIFS-179630

Castells, M. and Hall, P. (1994): Technopoles of the world: The making of twenty first century industrial complex. London: Routledge.

Florida, R. (2008): Who’s your city: How the creative economy is making where you live the most important decision of your life. NY: Basic Books.

Howkins, J. (2001): The creative economy: How people make money from ideas, New York: Penguin.

Lawrence, T. B.  and Phillips, N. (2002): Understanding cultural industries, Journal of Management Inquiry, 11, 4, 430-441.

Peris-Ortiz, M., Cabrera-Flores, M., Serrano-Santoyo, A. (Eds.) (2019). Cultural and Creative Industries: A Path to Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Nueva York: Springer.

UNESCO. (2004). UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Retrieved from https://es.unesco.org/creative-cities/.

Wróblewski, L., Gaio, A., and Rosewal, E. (2019): Sustainable cultural management, SI, 11(17), Sustainability.

Prof. Dr. Marta Peris-Ortiz
Dr. Mayer R. Cabrera-Flores
Dr. Alicia León-Pozo
Guest Editors

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• cultural and creative industries
• orange economy
• SARS-CoV-2
• social distancing, innovation and creativity
• consumption practices in a pandemic environment