Museums and Creative Industries. A joint venture for shaping access to culture

It comes with the huge collections of many museums that only the smallest amount of it is on display for the public. The rest remains packed in storage areas, awaiting its moment to come. But here is the rub: Museums usually lack staff as well as financial means in order to bring all their resources to light. Collaborating with a young generation of creative economists can be a solution. This article presents a promising creative collaboration originally taking place in Latvia.

By Ineta Simansone, First published in Arts Management Quarterly, Issue No. 125, November 2016, Page 26 - 28

 

Creative Museum is an independent think tank focusing on museums and creative industries. It serves as a platform for sharing knowledge, experience, innovation and creativity. Our mission is to challenge routine through critical thinking and spur innovation in museums via cross-sectoral collaboration and partnerships.

Even if occasionally we would hear that museums and creative industries have not much in common, in the last few years Creative Museum was able not only to highlight a variety of cooperation in result of which products and services with high added value were created, but also started to observe a change in attitude towards the very idea of bringing museums and makers together. We do also see an increasing interest among the makers and agents of creative industries themselves in museums as a resource for creative economies. Our conviction is that cooperation between museums and makers is the basis of communication work of a modern museum; to put it simple – an attempt to talk to the audience in a language it understands.

Mapping cooperation

At the European cultural policy level the Creative Europe framework program is providing an opportunity for museums to raise their profile in the field of creative economies. Creative Latvia and similar cultural policy initiatives in other European countries are recently projecting that same vision on a national level.

Engaging with this vision, think tank Creative Museum has been focusing on museums and creative economies as an undervalued resource for developing products and services with high added value, thus stimulating regeneration and growth.

Parallel to a local mapping exercise in Latvia, Creative Museum has initiated and is leading the working group Museums and Creative Industries within the Network of European Museum Organizations (NEMO).

As part of this assignment, in 2015 we published a report titled Museums and Creative Industries. Mapping cooperation where we tested the methodology for registering and evaluating various cooperation forms among museums and makers in Latvia. As a result we developed a toolkit for creative cooperation that can be used by museums and creative entrepreneurs to seek out what collaborative processes might benefit.

In 2016, the NEMO working group members applied this methodology to museums in Iceland, Romania, and Poland all at once in order to get the first international overview.

We are truly glad to be witnessing more and more outstanding examples of cooperation among museums and makers, authors, artists – the creative sector as such – both in Latvia and further afield to be appearing. It means there is more to be monitored and understood as to how museum resources can be used to create products and services with high added, and – not least – social value.

How to argue in favour of creative cooperation?

Creative Museum has shaped up the following recommendations to the authorities (in Latvia, 2015) in view to utilizing the potential of museums for developing creative economies:

1. Since in Latvia the synergy between museums and creative industries is a new trend and a new development direction for museums with quite a few experiences, it is necessary to create cooperation that provokes an informative and public background. It is necessary to promote the benefits of cooperation between museums and creative industries for both parties involved and for the public as a whole.

2. The significant prerequisite for the successful establishment and development of cooperation is an open internal culture of museums. Museums are traditionally quite conservative institutions, where changes occur slowly. It is therefore important to promote the readiness of museums to be open to various external expertise, as well as to ensure the availability of their collections.

3. Although the willingness to cooperate largely depends on the settings and development strategies of museums, the vision of museum management institutions on the necessity of synergy between museums and creative industries is also essential. On the one hand, even only a declarative statement by the Ministry of Culture and other ministries on the importance of such synergy could facilitate including this topic into the agenda, as well as directing museums towards the development of such cooperation. On the other hand, the availability of various funding types for cooperation projects gives an additional incentive for the greater development of synergies between museums and creative industries.

4. For the promotion of synergies it is important to ensure formal or informal platforms, where representatives of both parties can meet and network. The formal introduction and maintenance of such platforms may not be economically beneficial, but various kinds of informal networking opportunities could potentially produce the greatest benefits. Such could be regular annual mutual conferences, symposiums, exchange of experience events, etc. It is important to provide opportunities for the representatives of museums and creative industries to meet and get to know each other; which would be a first step towards cooperation in the near or distant future.

5. The study allowed the identification of one particular fact – in considering cooperation between museums and creative industries, the crucial aspect is the availability of museum collections. Specifically, when we are talking about the design sector. Therefore, the digitization of museum collections and their public availability is one of the key measures to be taken. The availability of collections must be less bureaucratic or even fully public (of course, not access to real items but rather to their digital form).

Ineta Zelča Sīmansone

Museologist, Project Manager and Consultant