Logics Hindering Digital Transformation in Cultural Heritage Strategic Management: An Exploratory Case Study

Museums play an important role in tourist flows, especially in cities that are famous for their cultural heritage. To valorize their role, these cultural institutions should open themselves to visitors as vectors of social, educational, and entertainment values. In particular, museums need to reinvent how they transmit information about their collections and how they engage visitors, keeping in mind the opportunities triggered by digitalization. Digital technologies could in fact be a powerful tool to assist in adopting a visitor-oriented approach and to stimulate a two-way communication. This article aims to analyze the extent of digitalization that should be integrated in museums' communication strategies, and to recognize the logics hindering digital transformation in cultural heritage strategic management. We developed an exploratory case study, focused on museums in Turin, Italy, gathering online data through institutional reports, museum websites, and social media, as well as onsite data mainly from semistructured interviews with museum managers. The research shows that most of the interviewees understand the strategic role of digitalization for museum development; however, the level of digital readiness remains low. Alongside the well-known systemic financial deficit of cultural institutions, there are other critical factors that hinder the integration of digitalization processes in the cultural heritage management. Common barriers include the presence of institutional pressures, and the lack of organizational and managerial coordination between different departments and functions that should be involved in the development of digital strategies and their integration in the strategic planning systems of museums. This research offers insights to tackle these challenges, allowing museums to compete in the international context of the cultural and heritage tourism

How Can Organisations and Business Models Lead to a More Sustainable Society? A Framework from a Systematic Review of the Industry 4.0

The concept of Industry 4.0 has been mainly addressed by the current literature from a technological perspective, overlooking the organisational and even ethical challenges related to this recent paradigm. In order to become ‘4.0 compliant’, an enterprise must adapt its organisation and business approaches, and these changes may lead to a significant impact on sustainability. Therefore, we performed a systematic literature review to investigate the most recent Industry 4.0 research streams by adopting a multi-perspective approach. This analysis led to collect insights on the key traits of an Enterprise 4.0: integration, decomposed hierarchy, flexibility, and autonomy. Each of these keywords involves work environments, business and organisational models, and educational approaches, which constitute the key traits of the novel framework proposed in this study

Business model innovation in SMEs engaging in innovation ecosystems. A decoupling perspective

Digital technologies have been increasingly affecting our day-to-day activities, drastically reshaping markets and society. The diffusion of new digital technologies\u2014such as social media, cloud computing, mobile computing, 3D printing, and big-data analytics \u2013 is posing firms to challenges, creating opportunities to develop radically new business models. However, despite the growing interest towards this issue, the contribute of digitalisation from the perspective of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is still such an under-investigated topic. SMEs are considered a driving force in most national economies, contributing heavily to employment, innovation and economic growth, but at the same time they often suffer from lack of both financial and human resources. These weaknesses may be compensated by the inflow and outflow of knowledge and capital boosted by technological innovation and participation within innovation ecosystems. The aim of this paper is to understand, through the lens of the institutional theory, how both the relationships established within the ecosystem and the internal organizational capabilities of SMEs impact on business model innovation thanks to the adoption of digital technologies such as Internet of things, big data, and open data. To do so the authors carried out an embedded case study on an Italian Industry 4.0 project which involved several actors (e.g. food SMEs, universities, technology consulting companies, and Piedmont Region). First findings on this ongoing research show that innovation ecosystems could represent a strong driver for developing an innovative business model oriented to value co-creation provided that SMEs already own distinctive dynamic capabilities. Without these capabilities it would be difficult to fully exploit the digital opportunities arising from the relationships among the heterogeneous actors which are part of the project