Everyone’s collections at Art Museums: groundbreaking digital business strategy as cornerstone for synergies

Purpose of the paper: This paper aims to investigate how an innovative digital strategy of a museum could develop new avenues for business and social value, looking into its role as a booster of competitive advantage for cultural institutions and as a possible source of socio-cultural development.

Methodology: The research project focuses on the analysis of the Rijksmuseum’s re-opening strategy, using a case-based qualitative and recursive approach, where the outcome of each phase has been the starting point of the following phase.

Findings: “Open digital-cultural contents” make art and culture more accessible, stimulating people to value Cultural Heritage, heightening the level of cultural participation by lowering the threshold to experience culture and art. This e-strategy has been the precondition to develop synergies and alliances, moving towards a creative economy by catalysing spillovers in a wide range of economic and social contexts.

Research limits: This is a case-based research paper with contextual factors, but we consider the data to be particularly suitable for illustrating and extending relationships and logic among constructs.

Practical implications: The research contributes to better unlock the potential of the digital-cultural-contents leading to understanding of how to boost the durability of cultural organizations and unlock the potential of cultural and creative industries (CCIs).

Originality of the paper: Identifying synergies emerging from museums’ ground-breaking digital-strategies adds significantly to the body of knowledge on the topic of innovation management in the cross-fertilization territories of the CCIs.

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