We work closely with the museums to gain an understanding of the conditions, challenges, visions, and opportunities for innovation and renewal. Together, we initiate and follow a process of change at each museum, co-creating knowledge about and competence in museum entrepreneurship that can be directly applied to their operations.
The museums participating in the project finance parts of their museum activities themselves, but also receive grants, which requires them to work actively to create economic sustainability so that they can meet society's demand to preserve, use, and develop cultural heritage.
Entrepreneurial approach
At the same time, the general idea in society is that culture should be inexpensive or free, which creates tension or imbalance. To meet these challenges, an entrepreneurial approach is needed that can create economic, social, and cultural value through new combinations of resources, people, and ideas.
In the project, we develop capabilities and new methods for museums to become attractive in new contexts and to new target groups. We collaborate with the museums to develop their entrepreneurial knowledge and study how entrepreneurial work in a museum context can be conducted in new ways, for sustainable collaboration with the museums’ stakeholders. Our main focus is on creating attraction values through digitalisation and development of destinations and rural areas.
We collaborate with museums in Småland and the surrounding regions, but the results from our research will serve as a basis for learning for all museums that want to develop an entrepreneurial approach in their work.
The new knowledge generated by the project will also contribute to the work of industry organisations and administrations, and support structures and policy makers interested in developing the entrepreneurial museum of the future.