A Significant Transformation of a Technical Museum: A Mini Case Study

Abstract

This mini case study describes a significant transformation in the public sector: the reinvention of Bonn’s outpost of the famous Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world’s leading museums to present and explain masterpieces of science and technology. The Deutsches Museum Bonn (abbreviated: DMB), small compared with the main museum in Munich but with a fine selection of exhibits from the history of science and technology since the second world war, and founded as a “compensation” for the Bonn region following the move of the German government from Bonn to Berlin, came under financial pressure some years ago and needed a new financial base. This crisis was used to foster a radical reinvention of the DMB in the direction of a (regional) center and forum for artificial intelligence (AI), embedded in a network of public and private organizations working in or close to the same field. This endeavor had to take place in a very demanding environment as the “parent” museum in Munich, the Deutsches Museum Munich (DMM) has, for some years now, been undergoing its own very large transformation connected with the renovation of the main location on an island of the river Isar crossing Munich and changes to various other exhibition spaces in Munich. Additionally, a totally new location of the Deutsches Museum has been—also—created in Nuremberg. This all means that the management attention of the Deutsches Museum headquarters for DMB had, of course, some clear limitations as well as placing restrictions on the central funding of DMB’s transformation. So, the small DMB team mostly had to shoulder the transformation itself, supported by some internal experts from the headquarters and external experts. And financially the transformation was funded by a series of partners but mostly by the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and a local foundation, created especially for this purpose which received a significant contribution from Telekom Foundation. From a content point of view the transformation project was extremely successful: the concept for “the new DMB” has been drafted and the first implementation steps have been successfully achieved—and the public feedback could not be better—even in times of COVID-19, where visitor numbers decreased by 67% as a consequence of lockdown and closure. But even though the transformation project has succeeded the maintenance after full implementation is still ongoing as the funding is only secured for the project phase. The city of Bonn, which was one of the key funders of the museum in the years after its foundation, got unfortunately exactly in this time period suddenly in a desolate financial situation, which was triggered among other things by some failed large (building and renovation) projects. This meant that the city suddenly had other priorities. And the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) which stepped in with some project funding for the reinvention cannot easily take on the day-to-day operations funding by law—and private donors will not be able to plug all the gaps to fund maintenance operations. This is an interesting situation showing that transformations in the public sector need a holistic view—also covering maintenance after implementation—from both a content and a financial aspect. In the case under consideration, the content perspective is not the critical one, it is the financial one—but if this cannot be fixed, content-related issues will arise soon. As a result, the full ecosystem needed to make public transformations succeed sustainably will be considered in the article. Expressed in terms of the Three-Pillar Model (abbreviated in the following as “3-P Model”) developed in previous books (“Three Pillars for Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times—Navigating Your Company Successfully Through the twenty-first Century Business World” by Wollmann et al. (2020) and “Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times—Design and Implementation Using the 3-P Model” by Wollmann et al. (2021); details see below) this means that the three pillars of the 3-P Model are excellently covered by the DMB transformation: the Sustainable Purpose of the transformation is as attractive and exciting as it is obviously important, the DMB team is a “Travelling Organization” par excellence, always capable and ready to start demanding journeys into unknown territory and also the last pillar, Connectivity, could not be better covered by the excellent network build up. But the overall ecosystem, especially in the aspects of finding well-coordinated, fast decisions and joint priorities and sustainable funding in the long term, is not ideal. Remark: The author is a member of the DM foundation in Munich and of the DMB foundation in the Bonn region and has been closely connected with the DMB for more than 20 years, going back to his business functions in his enterprise in Bonn, which launched several cooperation activities with DMB.