Facilitating Innovation in the Economy of Choice: A Case Study of Research on Museum

Abstract

Over the past decade, museums all over the world have faced increasing pressures to transform as a result of visitor changes and technological advancement. “Excellence and Equity: Education and Public Dimension of Museums” published by the American Association of Museums (AAM) describe that the museum has become an intermediary and public education centers for social inclusion. (Yuha Jung, 2011) In the economy of choice, it is no longer collections that drive the priorities of museums but rather the needs of communities. At the same time, museums increasingly rely on the interpretation of their resources to provide distinctive experiences that attract and engage visitors. New challenges lead to new applications. With this background, Innovation, which in essence can be defined as “the development of new customer’s value through solutions that meet new needs, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market” (Alshammari, A. A., Rasli, A., Alnajem, M., & Arshad, A. S, 2014) has become a key factor for the success of museum. Through case studies and analysis with multiple design methods in open innovation and social innovation, the research seeks to better understand the role of “innovation” in the interpretation projects in a modern museum perspective, and the role of strategic design in the transforming complicated context of modern museum to help reach out the most practical strategy. Moreover, the paper presents a new framework for innovation methods to be used in the modern museum context. The theoretical framework of the framework is based on three concepts: open innovation, social innovation, and innovative design thinking toolkit. The framework is structured to make innovation in the museum more replicable, scalable and operable, and it could be used as a planning tool to carry out innovation or evaluate innovation. This paper argues that museum innovation is a field of specialized interdisciplinary practice that exemplifies the highly collaborative and strategic nature of contemporary design practice. Designer’s role in this transforming context should be the leader, the facilitator, the generalist, the user advocate, and the analyst. This article is still at an early step in the challenges of museum innovation and the research will continue.