The first decade of activity of Artes was entirely focused on studying the central issues of training both individuals and organisations. In particular, it analysed how European companies in the ’80s and ’90s, despite facing a competitive battle, managed to transform the training function, that used to be specialised and essentially unrelated to the daily activities, in a fundamental lever for the development of enterprises – just like the technological, financial and commercial leverage.
In the late ’90s Artes developed a model capable of reading and triggering a process of learning/change in a local ‘fragile’ community: a community suffering from severe and enduring characters of underdevelopment, structurally marginal/peripheral, but endowed with an important environmental, historical and cultural heritage. The goal is the creation of a transferable model, that combines the diagnosis of development potential with the identification of concrete paths of growth: not for an individual, nor a company and not for a network of businesses, but of a local community “made” of people, organisations, as well as its environment – climate, topography.
The awards of major international funding makes the ambitious goal, ‘practicable’. Between 1997 and 2000 more than 100 experts, entrepreneurs, and managers from all over the world (Canada, Australia, USA, Europe) worked remotely and on the spot in order to the design and test the project ALLIANCE _ An Alliance for Development of Work and Enterprise in Rural Areas. Over 1000 people were involved in five different communities. Once the conceptual phase and the first experiments were completed, the model was transferred in multiple contexts and declinations, and today is a unique heritage of knowledge, relationships and tools suitable for programs for civil and economic regeneration of communities, which ARTES proposes in contexts where accelerated processes of job and business creation are requested, in areas that have experienced profound and long lasting armed conflict or that have suffered the effects of natural disasters, blood feuds or abuse by criminal gangs.
- first action of recognition and identification of the potential for territorial development (technological and economic) and of feasibility conditions
- selection and training of task forces of change facilitators
- selection and training of local administrators
- feasibility studies of infrastructure and services
- analysis of the potential and plans to start-up business