Abstract
As organizations are increasingly involving individuals across their boundaries in the generation of new knowledge, crowd involvement can also be beneficial to cultural heritage organizations. We argue that in an “Open Innovation in Science” approach, visitors can contribute to generate new scientific knowledge concerning their behavior and preferences, by which museum managers can re-design the cultural offerings of their institutions in ways that generate major economic and social impacts. Accordingly, we advance visitor-sensing as a novel framework in which museum managers leverage digital technologies to collect visitors’ ideas, preferences, and feedback in order to improve path design and the organization of artwork in exhibitions, and to shape a more satisfying museum experience for visitors. We contend that visitor-sensing has the potential to yield higher numbers of visitors, with positive impacts in terms of increased revenues and increased literacy of the general public, thus benefiting the economic and social sustainability of cultural organizations towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals outlined in the Agenda 2030.
Highlights
“Museums need to step into the future” as recently written by Dr Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, that supports cultural heritage institutions [1]
We argue that in an “Open Innovation in Science” approach, visitors can contribute to generate new scientific knowledge concerning their behavior and preferences, by which museum managers can re-design the cultural offerings of their institutions in ways that generate major economic and social impacts
An “Open Innovation in Science” (OIS) approach can help to achieve these aims by leveraging in-bound knowledge flows to generate new scientific knowledge concerning visitors’ behavior and preferences, by which museum managers can shape the cultural offerings of their institutions in ways that generate major economic and social impacts
Summary
“Museums need to step into the future” as recently written by Dr Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, that supports cultural heritage institutions [1]. The involvement of crowds in inbound OI initiatives, i.e., where knowledge flows from outside to inside the organizational boundaries, is increasingly practiced by public and private organizations, through crowdsourcing or citizen science initiatives, for their research purposes and to improve their products, services, and organizational routines [22,23]. The ways in which, at the crossroad between crowdsourcing and citizen science, crowds can be involved by cultural organizations for enhancing the scientific understanding of the behavior and preferences of visitors, the insights they can provide, and the ensuing benefits for both cultural organizations and the overall society, have not been systematically examined so far. The purpose of this paper was to advance visitor-sensing as a novel framework that, while drawing on OI, OIS, and crowdsourcing and citizen science, is focused on (and devoted to) cultural heritage organizations, and museums in particular, and to shed light on the advantages of its implementation. We believe that identifying the boundaries of visitor-sensing and its benefits can stimulate scholars to conduct scientific studies about it and cultural organizations to put in practice our proposed framework
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