We've just had two very interesting (and well received) opening presentations, from Carol Lynn Alpert, who reflected back on her experiences at the Museum of Science, Boston, and from Bryan Kennedy, who talked about how the Science Buzz project at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
I'm going to ask Carol Lynn and Bryan to each post a brief entry about their presentations, perhaps including their slides or a short summary, so I won't try to repeat it all here. However, one of the key points (for me at least) from Carol Lynn's presentation, was the need for innovator (such as those delivering contemporary science issues in new ways) to have a level of autonomy within an organisation, in order to overcome institutional inertia.
Carol mentioned a book (or article?) on this topic, for further reading (which I'll try and get the reference for), but I wondered what the experiences are of other colleagues in this area? One observation I note is that several organisations seem to be partly tackling this problem by engaging with a wider community in order to foster innovation, either through developer communities (of enthusiastic amateurs), or by employing external agencies. Is this a useful way forward for museums, or should be be doing more to foster innovation in-house?
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Hi Frankie and an interesting post. Hope the workshop went well. Regarding your question we have had several discussions about the whole organisational change issue on several other blogs:
* my audience research blog post Museums and Web 2.0
* New Literacy New Audiences blog discussion
* posts on fresh+new here
I think there's something to say for letting innovators within the institution just go for it and see what happens. One of the DEMOS reports (can't remember which - either the young people one or the cultural participation one) had something to say about getting a bunch of people together (internal and external) in a room and see what happens. That's what we'll be doing at the Museum later this year in our e-Kids' College.
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