From Cultural Heritage to Creative Enterprise: A University–Community Collaboration Framework for Sustainable Creative Tourism in Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Purpose—Historic destinations face an acute policy trilemma: stimulating vibrant creative-economy microenterprises without precipitating overtourism, gentrification, or the commercial degradation of living heritage. This paper establishes a university–community collaboration architecture through which Samarkand, Uzbekistan, can bridge intangible cultural heritage safeguarding, experiential creative tourism, and technopreneurial incubation to maximize locally retained economic value. Design/methodology/approach—The study adopts a design-science conceptual synthesis and institutional policy framework methodology, integrating peer-reviewed scholarship across creative tourism, entrepreneurial university ecosystems, multi-helix governance, and digital microenterprise incubation. UNESCO World Heritage documentation for Samarkand and Bukhara's UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) trajectory provide empirical institutional anchors. Four formal conceptual propositions are formulated to govern systemic deployment. Findings—The architecture delineates six structural policy functions: (1) heritage stewardship and customary rights; (2) participatory experience co-design; (3) university-anchored technopreneurial incubation; (4) ethical digital market access and CRM; (5) polycentric financing and equitable benefit-sharing; and (6) multidimensional indicator monitoring. These functions are operationalized into a hexa-helix responsibility matrix, three experiential pilot prototypes, an iterative implementation pipeline, and a balanced sustainability scorecard aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 8, 9, 11, and 12) and the UNESCO Culture|2030 Indicators. Originality/value—Deviating from conventional volume-driven destination management models, this framework positions resident artisan agency, communal intellectual property protection, and living-lab learning loops as structural prerequisites for market entry, offering a transferable model for heritage cities across the Global South and Central Asia. Practical implications—Municipal directorates, higher education leadership, artisan guilds (mahalla craft collectives), and digital platform operators can directly utilize this modular architecture to design, de-risk, and assess small-scale creative pilots prior to city-scale deployment.