When Museums Do Not Exclude: Inclusive Innovation Strategies for XXI Century Museums

The object of this paper is inclusive innovation strategies of museums. By this, it is meant innovation processes aimed to ensure access to and participation in the activities of the museum to categories of citizens who may be excluded for physical, cognitive, cultural and social reasons. The goal of the work is purely theoretical. It aims to contribute to the academic debate about the role of culture as an instrument for social inclusion, developed in the last ten years. Among the various cultural institutions, museums represent a particularly interesting analytical field. Three are the main reasons: since its origins, it has been thought of as an institution actively influencing the society; the variety of museums in the international landscape makes it an interesting field for a broad and deep analysis; the variety of projects implemented by different museums allows scholars to represent properly the different categories of exclusion mentioned above. The objective of this work is twofold: to propose a conceptual framework to place various inclusive innovation strategies in and to provide museums' management with suggestions about competences to implement them. The work is divided in several parts. The first one provides an argument supporting the relevance of inclusion as a goal for a museum's innovation strategies. The second describes the possible causes of exclusion from museums' activities. The conceptual proposal of the third part consists of a map that highlights different strategies of inclusive innovation. This is built on the relation with the various orientations that museums can have towards inclusion. Finally, the last part suggests some competence development paths that are functional to the implementation of inclusive innovation strategies.