Alberto Cottica

Music and social sciences have always been my main interests. Unable to decide between the two, I decided to pursue both and ended up a strange mixture of folk-world musician and economist interested in human creativity as a development engine.

As an economist, I set myself the goal of contributing to building an economy propelled chiefly by human intelligence - creativity, innovation, culture - rather than physical resources or the exploitation of man over man and nature. I am convinced that this model can emerge from the “perfect storm” under way in the digital economy, and that the music industry and the creative industries in general are a good place to watch it from and, just maybe, to intervene in the process. I have chosen to represent the general interest rather than a single company’s: I am interested in public policy as intelligent participation in collective choice. I work a lot on social networks, both physical and online, as a tool to design and deploy policies. At the moment I am project manager for the Development Policy Unit of the Italian government’s Ministry for Economic Development on the issue of art and creativity as economic development tools.

As a musician I am interested in our common roots, especially those of my native Emilia Romagna region, which I like to expose to a fairly global audience. My main project is digital folk group Fiamma Fumana, active chiefly in North America and northern Europe. I also work with my old friend Cisco and occasionally with some non-Italian world music artists like the British band Transglobal Underground and Danish singer Gudrun Holck. I also am among the founders of Italian folk-rock band Modena City Ramblers, but now I am not involved with them anymore.