Visitors’ involvement in cultural organizations for a better experience

Cultural institutions are increasingly adopting a managerialization of their administration, i.e. the application of managerial concepts to non-profit organizations and other untraditional business to improve their efficacy and efficiency (Ferri and Zan, 2014; Pegoraro and Zan, 2017; Zan, 2000; Zan et al., 2007). In previous decades, a top-down approach was typically adopted (Zan et al., 2007), while the usefulness of a bottom-up approach to improve the products/services provided is increasingly evident from management studies (Cappa et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2012). It has been demonstrated that the public should not be seen as passive but rather useful actors who can be engaged in improving the products/services provided by organizations in different fields. To this extent science is rediscovering the crucial role of user involvement anticipated by von Hippel (1976). In this vein, cultural institutions are increasingly interested in involving visitors to improve their experience (Anberrée et al., 2015). This change in the cultural field is transforming the relationship between people and art organizations in a similar fashion to what it is happening in the R&D processes of companies with respect to citizen science and crowdsourcing phenomena (Cappa et al., 2016; Penin and Burger-Helmchen, 2011). In the specific context of cultural institutions, customers can provide their ideas to improve the cultural offer, or they can provide data related to their individual preferences to be later analyzed by the museum managers/organizers.