Cultural Startups and the Challenge of Phygital Approaches: Cases From Italy

The digital transformation is also taking place in the cultural heritage sector. For it to be effective, there is a need for a structured innovation plan. At the same time, the cultural start-up phenomenon is also becoming increasingly popular among management scholars. The author will focus on the concept phygital, understood as the exploitation of technology to build a bridge between the physical and digital world, reconnecting it to the concept of cultural start-up with the aim of contributing to a reference literature that is not yet much robust. The analysis of the case studies of the selected cultural startups brings out that museums, event organizations, cultural tourism, and archaeological sites management companies are devising increasingly captivating formulas such as those “phygital.” Some theoretical implication include focus on the customer hyper-connected, assessment on increasingly close (sometimes symbiotic) relationship with technology, and, thanks to it, to live in two worlds at the same time, the physical one and the other digital.