The cross-cutting approach to culture that Diversum promotes opens up a whole new field of responsibilities and opportunities.
A field of responsibilities because it positions culture as a richly diverse ecosystem. This acknowledgement adds to the concept of sustainable development, underscoring the fact that mankind’s environment is not limited to nature: it is simultaneously natural, cultural and social.
Of course, the cross-cutting approach to culture is also a field of opportunities. It promotes value chains that create richness and that were insufficiently identified in the past.



Cultural diversity: a new driver of the economy based on two mutually supportive logics

Firstly, this pertains to all the economic processes that adapt goods and services to the unique features of each culture, so long as those features are aligned with a universal base. The first path of the driver of cultural diversity is horizontal (geographic).

The second path of the economic driver that is diversity is built on the immense potential for the cultural enrichment of products, regardless of business sector (vertical path). This track appears all the more promising in that it is compatible with a more limited use of natural resources. In practice, culturally promoting goods and services means drawing from materials that are essentially symbolic.

It is the combination of these two paths - adaptation to diversity and promotion of goods and services through culture - that Diversum designated in 2011 as the “purple economy”.



First reference text

  “The purple economy, an objective, an opportunity.pdf” (PDF, 233 ko)