Abstract

The article looks at the contemporary stage of the historic enterprise as a factory of culture, capable of producing internally and communicating externally the value of heritage as a fundamental part of corporate culture, the contents of which serve to engage with different stakeholders and new users, a glue that hold together local communities and the community. In particular, it investigates the growing role played by archive-mania as an effect of a widespread archival culture that valorizes sources, locating in the past the guarantee of authenticity and corporate social responsibility, thanks also to a mix of valorization and communication of the past, in which the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the cultural and the commercial become blurred and more difficult to distinguish. Finally, it examines the historic enterprise's narrative potential, which lends itself to new interpretations from the point of view of Industry 4.0, whose experiential and multidisciplinary dimension, implicit in its production processes, responds to the needs for participation and sharing expressed by contemporary cultural consumption, which appreciates the mix of art, fashion, cinema and design as an effect of artification: the aestheticization of products and services.