Opportunità e potenzialità del turismo industriale: il progetto “Make it in Puglia”

Nowadays tourism demand grows to new innovative sustainable and experiential proposals. This paper explores the potentiality of a specific form of experiential tourism, the industrial tourism, also through the illustration of an innovative project, which tries taking its opportunities for the Puglia region in Italy. In the last years, there has been a growing presence of academic contributions about industrial tourism, also as a result on experimental initiatives
started in many countries around the world. The term “industrial tourism” is the most recurrent, even if different concepts appear for various reasons, in order to better specify its scope and aim, like “living tourism industry” (also present in Spanish as “turismo de industria viva”), “tourisme de la découverte économique” (i.e. economic discovery tourism) in French, and “turismo d’impresa” (i.e. entrepreneurial tourism) in Italian. Considering the literature review
on these concepts, industrial tourism can be conceived as an “umbrella” definition that is based on three major pillars: the industrial archaeological heritage; exhibitions, archives and museums of enterprise; active companies. These three elements offer different types of a strand of cultural tourism linked to the world of industrial and handicraft production, especially where there are proofs and experiences of this kind of business, that transmit stories of artisans and entrepreneurs of great interest. The literature has also described three possible and different ways of conceiving industrial tourism. The first one, defined as “heritage marketing”, is aimed at the conservation and development of material assets; the second one, defined as “functionalist”, focuses on the company as an economic and cultural subject; the third one, defined as “educational marketing oriented” brings to disclosure and dissemination of new business models, also with a massive use of multimedia tools.
Starting from these premises, this paper gives a specific look into an experimental project, started in 2018 and still in progress, named “Make it in Puglia”, whose aim is creating a regional industrial tourism network. The history of Puglia industrial production was mainly connected with its rural culture evolution, initially made of olive oil, wine, spirit (alcohol), cereals (the province of Capitanata was considered “the breadbasket of Europe”), pasta and tobacco,which still constitute the most important industries in the region, even for the export.
The research method of this paper is of qualitative nature, using case studies to analyze in deep the subject of the work. More specifically, a multiple case study approach has been used, through three cases belonging to the project “Make it in Puglia”, which is briefly presented in this work, through its technical and operational conditions, mainly based on service delivery standards. The three cases have been chosen from a selection of twenty-five entities participating in the experimental project, belonging to various realities as active companies, corporate museums, and industrial heritage sites.
The development of the case studies has been realized in order two validate two research hypotheses:
1. The potentiality of industrial tourism is higher if the industrial tourism proposal is connected with the perceived quality or excellence of the local production.
2. The potentiality of industrial tourism is higher, when this kind of tourism is based on a series of events or initiatives, which are able to reinforce its experiential dimension.
With reference to the first point, starting from the Make it in Puglia project, there is a significant geographic overlap between the production system connected with the territorial excell