The Value of Street Furniture as a Resource For Business and Tourism Development. The Case Of The Dro Municipality in Trentino

This study has two goals: presenting the characteristic features of a new street furniture intervention and examining them from the view-point of business. The conceptual lens used for this purpose is the resource-based view (R-BV) of the firm, which only gives importance to those resources which are deemed ‘valuable’, ‘rare’, ‘inimitable’ and ‘non-substitutable’. The outcome of the theoretical assessment reveals the “value” of the new street furniture and the satisfaction with it, which is testified by the coming back of a number of firms, by the activation of private investments and by the fact that the existing businesses stopped leaving the old town centre. Emerges the possibility to exploit street furniture as a valuable firm’s resource through the start-up of firms which apply widespread hospitality models as the ‘Albergo Diffuso’ (literally translated in:“scattered hotel”).