Reviving Taiwan's craft bamboo industry: Evaluating recent strategies to transform a heritage craft sector into a contemporary cultural industry

Policy-makers increasingly see cultural industries as important economic contributors with the added scope to sustain local identity. Since 1991, Taiwan's Ministries of Culture and Education have sought to revive Taiwan's bamboo crafts, including for their cultural heritage value, in the face of damaging competition from cheap imports. Various policies and programs have sought to give new strength and vitality to Taiwanese cultural production. Despite some noteworthy individual products, such efforts typically neglect the root causes for the decline of Taiwan's bamboo industries. Research suggests that successful cultural industries need a critical mass of creative innovators, entrepreneurs and skilled workers and advanced manufacturing capability. The paper discusses industry development strategies to date, arguing that the main hurdle to the revitalization of Taiwan's bamboo industries is a lack of an innovation culture in manufacturing companies to drive new product development compounded by design graduates' limited exposure to bamboo as a material.