Innovation practices in cultural organisations: implications for innovation policy

Abstract

This paper explores the innovation practices in a distinctive and vital part of the growing tourism industry, that of cultural organisations. These organisations have received limited attention from previous in-depth qualitative research on innovation practices. The investigation in this paper is based on in-depth interviews with key-employees in 27 cultural organisations. The findings suggest that the innovation practices when cultural organisations carry out incremental and liminal innovation activities differ from the practices used during more radical innovation activities. Sources of incremental and liminal innovations are often found to be stakeholders external to the organisation, such as the audience, whereas sources of more radical innovations are often found to be internal employees, and in particular the artists themselves or the artistic management team. These employees typically develop radically new cultural offerings with high levels of autonomy from the general management and the market. The paper discusses the implications that these findings have on innovation policy.