Socio-economic issues in the field of cultural heritage have been researched at Fraunhofer IMW for more than 10 years. Now the institute is expanding its research activities to Southeast Asia. The Leipzig research center has recently signed strategic cooperation agreements with key players in cultural heritage management in Southeast Asia, namely UNESCO's regional office for Asia-Pacific and the Siam Society Under Royal Patronage, the oldest organization for the protection of culture, history, art and natural sciences in Thailand.

The cooperation includes, among other things, a joint digital pilot workshop series with the UNESCO regional office on the topic of sustainable value creation and cultural heritage management. The cooperation is based on the "Competency Framework for Cultural World Heritage Management" developed by UNESCO. The Leipzig researchers are supplementing this overarching concept with specific competencies, which are intended above all to strengthen the management skills and the entrepreneurial thinking of the participants.

The target group of the workshop series are interested researchers with different specializations. The three events taking place in the period from 27.7. to 5.8.2020 will be carried out within the framework of the URGENT 2.0 project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), in which the Fraunhofer IMW is cooperating with the School of Public Policy at Chiang Mai University.

Henrik Beermann (Deputy Head of Innovation Acceptance Unit), Dr. Christine Richter (Research Fellow, Innovation Acceptance Unit) and Manuel Molina Vogelsang (Research Fellow, Innovation Policy and Transfer Design Unit) will discuss with the participants how the concept of sustainability can contribute to new, economically viable cultural heritage solutions.

In the long term, Fraunhofer IMW, together with the UNESCO regional office, is planning to develop, validate and scale digital training formats for specific target groups. This is to be implemented in a recently applied for research project, in which the Siamese Society is also involved. The latter also acts as a multiplier for the dissemination of the project results in the Southeast Asian region via the "ASEAN Cultural Heritage Alliance".