Chairs: O. Missikoff, Italy / W. Börner, Austria
The Cultural Heritage (CH) domain has recently been interested by a deep rethinking of its intrinsic essence. The socio-economic context in which CH institutions were created has changed dramatically, and the pressure for undergoing a substantial restructuring is increasing constantly. Such restructuring, in order to produce results, should indeed affect most aspects of CH institutions: from the mission itself to inner organisational configuration, from human resources to customer relationship management, from technological solutions to marketing and promotion. This phenomenon is generated by two key factors:
(i) the need to raise financial resources independently from public funds, and
(ii) the increasing request for high quality, value added, services from a demanding cultural tourism.
The proposed model is intended as an integration of organisational models and technological solutions, customised for providing the various categories of CH institutions with a support for designing a sustainable evolutionary roadmap and a management model for facing the new challenges. The final goal is represented by the transformation of cultural institutions in “state of art”, networked organisations, here defined as Cultural Service Providers (CSP). The roadmap towards innovation will therefore proceed along three main streamlines: 1. Organisational models (designed for cultural institutions)
2. Technological solutions (for supporting innovation and management activities)
3. Knowledge management and dissemination (by means of Domain ontologies)
The chosen approach is fully interdisciplinary and the epistemological basis ranges from studies on cybernetic, cultural economics, and ontologies. An integration of contributions from these three fields of research, opportunely adapted to the characteristics of the CH domain, is proposed as a viable solution for the complex scenario outlined above.