Paper long abstract:

The paper shows the preliminary results of an ongoing project on the relation between fashion industry, universities and regional policies in Veneto region. Indeed, the off-shoring of production during last decade in this region and the consequent effort by recent policies to integrate research, industry and territory in creative sector seem to offer a privileged fieldwork to study how creativity is re-organized along with the re-organization of knowledge and landscape.

The case study has been conducted in a fashion company adopting qualitative research methods, through documentary analysis as well as collecting in-depth interviews with professionals and ethnographic notes emphasizing the socio-material aspects of fashion processes. The following questions are taken into exam:

- How creative process is performed and distributed?

- What kind of knowledge is at stake?

- How knowledge is organized in creative practices?

In exploring these questions, the paper aims to contribute to understand the formation, circulation and stabilization of "creative knowledge". Accordingly, the research maps the creative process and analyses the relations between fashion SMEs, university and government, following the accounts (and practices) of fashion scholars, practitioners and policymakers.