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This article tracks the design of a panoptic toolkit of complementary financial (grant and endowment, tax, debt and equity) and non-financial (regulation, real estate, risk mitigation and performance, capacity building, impact metric and digital network) instruments, designed to leverage capital investment and engender collaborative partnerships, to encourage investment capital to flow to cultural heritage adaptive reuse activities. Cultural heritage activities encompass adaptive reuse and energy retrofit of built heritage structures, protecting natural eco-systems and enabling local community enterprise activities. These activities embody circular economy dimensions, that stimulate social, cultural, environmental and economic regeneration, within the global value chain. Many cultural heritage investments entail long-term time horizons, requiring patient investment strategies. Consideration of the financial landscape, with regard to capital investment leverage is as much about understanding the motivations of participants to engage in the capital markets, as about innovations in financial instruments to safeguard cultural heritage values. Individual financial instruments, within the toolkit, such as debt and equity tools, are not new and some have a long association within traditional capital markets. What is new, is a framework for the engagement of blended complementary instruments, pooled within diverse multidisciplinary collaborative social enterprise fund structures, to achieve intentional and measurable impact investment returns. Risk adjusted investment return metrics include the analysis of socio-cultural and environmental impact returns in unison with market based financial returns, including below market returns in some instances. A case study of a revolving social impact fund is provided to give a practical example of combined complementary hybrid financial instruments within a collaborative funding structure. The ultimate choice and design of blended and pooled hybrid tool combinations and hybrid fund structures will change from building to building, and community to community, but must always prioritize the need to protect people and ecosystems in parallel with saving vulnerable cultural heritage resources. The selection of tailored hybrid financial instruments, to enhance circular economy transitionary ambitions, must remain flexible within a long-term collaborative investment strategy. The key change in mindset, central to cultural heritage financial toolkit development, is the enablement of capital leverage investment strategies that prioritize people and the ecosystem over pure profit motivation.

The smart specialisation approach is becoming a strategic instrument for identifying regions’ opportunities for growth and sustainable development. It is a place-based approach and plays an important role in benchmarking regional competitiveness. To have a smart specialisation strategy has been thought of as a key factor in making a choice for investment. Smart specialisation strategies represent a policy measure to overcome disorganised and weak parallel activities in developed EU countries and offer support to those areas that have research, technological and production capacity to carry out particular activities. Smart specialisation strategies, therefore, follow the socio-economic situation in countries and their integrated technological, institutional and business processes. The EU Member States and regions recognised that supporting a limited number of well-identified priorities for knowledge-based investments and/or clusters could advance, focusing on competitive assets and realistic growth capabilities reinforced by a critical mass of action and entrepreneurial resources. However, the role of culture and cultural heritage has not been significant in these processes. As the policy review revealed that circular economy should be considered as a broader sustainable development strategy, which should also “support Member States and regions to strengthen innovation for the circular economy through smart specialisations”, the purpose of this paper is to lay a basis for a new, stronger complementarity between culture, cultural heritage and adaptive reuse practices, and circular economy concepts through smart specialisation strategies.

The complexity of Neolithic population movements and their interpretation through material culture have been the subject of archaeological research for decades. One of the dominant narratives proposes that groups from the Starčevo-Körös-Criş complex spread from the central towards the northern Balkans in the Early Neolithic and eventually brought the Neolithic lifestyle into present-day Hungary. Broad geographical migrations were considered to shape the continuous expansion of Neolithic groups and individuals. However, recent archaeological research, aDNA, and isotope analyses challenged the synchronous appearance of specific material culture distributions and human movement dynamics through emphasizing communication networks and socio-cultural transformation processes. This paper seeks to retrace the complexity of Neolithic mobility patterns across Hungary by means of strontium and oxygen stable isotope analyses, which were performed on a total of 718 human dental enamel samples from 55 Neolithic sites spanning the period from the Starčevo to the Balaton-Lasinja culture in Transdanubia and from the Körös to the Tiszapolgár cultural groups on the Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld). This study presents the largest strontium and oxygen isotope sample size for the Neolithic Carpathian Basin and discusses human mobility patterns on various geographical scales and throughout archaeological cultures, chronological periods, and sex and gender categories in a multiproxy analysis. Based on our results, we discuss the main stages of the Neolithisation processes and particularly trace individual movement behaviour such as exogamy patterns within extensive social networks. Furthermore, this paper presents an innovative differentiation between mobility patterns on small, micro-regional, and supra-regional scales, which provides new insights into the complex organisation of Neolithic communities.

Nowadays, cultural heritage is more than ever linked to the present. It links us to our cultural past through the conscious act of preserving and bequeathing to future generations, turning society into its custodian. The appreciation of cultural heritage happens not only because of its communicative power, but also because of its economic power, through sustainable development and the promotion of creative industries. This paper presents SILKNOW, an EU-H2002 funded project and its application to cultural heritage, as well as to creative industries and design innovation. To this end, it presents the use of image recognition tools applied to cultural heritage, through the interoperability of data in the open-access registers of silk museums and its presentation, analysis and creative process carried out by the design students of EASD Valencia as a case study, in the branches of jewellery and fashion project, inspired by the heritage of silk. © 2020 by the authors.

Innovation constitutes the goal and at the same time the medium for achieving all E-RIHS strategic objectives and therefore the Innovation Agenda addresses all research actions and services, training and communication as well as collaborations with other RIs and Industry (in the broad sense), in the Heritage domain. The ‘Innovation Agenda’ represents the main action plan that reflects the priorities set in key areas and provides those mechanisms and structures necessary to enable innovation in any specific identified direction. The document reviews mechanisms, internal rules and procedures concerning the E-RIHS Innovation Strategy and discusses issues related to formulating, managing and keeping up-to-date the Innovation Agenda. A systematic approach in monitoring innovation, defining metrics and indicators (KPI’s), will provide a reliable assessment of the innovation impact to Excellence, Synergies and Co-creation, Users and public engagement and the Sustainability of E-RIHS ERIC as a leader in the global HS landscape. This document is Deliverable 9.4, elaborated in the context of E-RIHS PP, WP-09, Task 9.2, ‘Exploitation of E-RIHS capacities: innovation, transfer of knowledge and marketing’. The analysis for this task was based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research and builds upon Deliverable 9.2 ‘Analysis of The Innovation Background’.

Including human, technological, organizational, and natural resources, contemporary cities represent an urban reflection of civilization development. The globalization and competitiveness have shaped cities commercially, politically, socially, and in terms of their design and growth. Looking for the new urban patterns that could meet the global challenges, culture was recently recognized, as an indispensable part of the sustainability, and the significant pillar for grounding the Smart City initiatives. The management of cultural heritage is a significant factor for recognization, definition, and affirmation of cultural identity. Given that technology primarily enhances the urban infrastructure, the management of built heritage is significant within the Smart City development paradigm. For this paper, in the decision-making process, indicators related to the management of the cultural built heritage are divided into six groups: governing, economic, social, environmental, technological, and architectural factors. The paper aims to identify priority indicators, as necessary in the further development of heritage management, using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Interval Analytic Hierarchy Process (IAHP) methods. The isolation of dominant indicators should enable a more precise definition of future activities and measures. The application of these methods should address the extent to which differences in fuzzy and interval grading approaches may affect the final ranking.