Entrepreneurialism was a buzzword in museums a few years ago. But it can mean different things to different people.
To unpick what it means, I interviewed leaders across the sector to explore how it is being interpreted and applied.
Having been bandied around so frequently over the past few years, the word has lost some of its power.
But given the challenges, opportunities and threats facing some museums, I thought it would be useful to find out how approaches differed and what impacts have come from using unconventional approaches to income generation, increasing audience reach and, in some cases, programming.
Over a three-month period I spoke to directors and deputy directors at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Bede’s World, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Imperial War Museum, Geffrye Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
My background is in business, and four years ago I came into a local authority-run museum in Middlesbrough to set up a development team.
I knew that my take on things was a little different and was fascinated to find out how the same issues were being tackled in museums across the UK.
I found various interpretations of entrepreneurship being used, ranging from just being the remit of the commercial arm of the operation, to a broad sense of a spirit of enterprise across all departments.
Some museums are even rewriting their mission on the basis that open participation in creative thinking is the start of all future plans.
Unsurprisingly, I also found a fairly universal view of the sector as hierarchical and even Victorian in its approach to risk and reward.
The leaders I spoke to are willing to challenge this by bringing new talent into their organisations from the commercial world and putting a greater emphasis on empowerment of front-of-house teams.
They also want accountability for funding and income generation to be organisation wide and to place an increasing importance on listening to and being directed by audiences.
Some of the most inspirational and brave moves are happening in the regions. At Bede’s World, a museum that celebrates the life of a seventh-century saint in South Shields, the issue of relevance to the local audience is paramount. The director, Mike Benson, has adopted a radical approach.
He has adopted an inverted triangle management approach where enabled decision-making runs through the organisation and the senior teams and director are at the bottom of the structure. The research and interviews allowed me to define some trademarks of entrepreneurship at work.
These include:
Entrepreneurship is the not the end point, but the means to greater resilience and sustainability – changing approaches and bringing a degree of risk and reward into the equation.
There are exciting times ahead, and with more competition from both within and outside the sector, only the toughest and bravest museums will survive. But with so much talent, there are huge opportunities to play for.
Rachel French is a cultural entrepreneur and was a participant in the British Museum’s Fresh Leads Development programme
To unpick what it means, I interviewed leaders across the sector to explore how it is being interpreted and applied.
Having been bandied around so frequently over the past few years, the word has lost some of its power.
But given the challenges, opportunities and threats facing some museums, I thought it would be useful to find out how approaches differed and what impacts have come from using unconventional approaches to income generation, increasing audience reach and, in some cases, programming.
Over a three-month period I spoke to directors and deputy directors at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Bede’s World, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Imperial War Museum, Geffrye Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
My background is in business, and four years ago I came into a local authority-run museum in Middlesbrough to set up a development team.
I knew that my take on things was a little different and was fascinated to find out how the same issues were being tackled in museums across the UK.
I found various interpretations of entrepreneurship being used, ranging from just being the remit of the commercial arm of the operation, to a broad sense of a spirit of enterprise across all departments.
Some museums are even rewriting their mission on the basis that open participation in creative thinking is the start of all future plans.
Unsurprisingly, I also found a fairly universal view of the sector as hierarchical and even Victorian in its approach to risk and reward.
The leaders I spoke to are willing to challenge this by bringing new talent into their organisations from the commercial world and putting a greater emphasis on empowerment of front-of-house teams.
They also want accountability for funding and income generation to be organisation wide and to place an increasing importance on listening to and being directed by audiences.
Some of the most inspirational and brave moves are happening in the regions. At Bede’s World, a museum that celebrates the life of a seventh-century saint in South Shields, the issue of relevance to the local audience is paramount. The director, Mike Benson, has adopted a radical approach.
He has adopted an inverted triangle management approach where enabled decision-making runs through the organisation and the senior teams and director are at the bottom of the structure. The research and interviews allowed me to define some trademarks of entrepreneurship at work.
These include:
- Taking a window of opportunity or losing out.
- Responding to a market need and following your hunches.
- Basing new ideas on the in-house skills base.
- Trying it out on a small scale first, then tweaking.
- Being prepared to fail in order to unlock creativity and set others’ expectations accordingly.
- Knowing what to back and what to ditch (and when).
- Looking out for happy accidents, which are often better than outcomes of painstaking planning.
Entrepreneurship is the not the end point, but the means to greater resilience and sustainability – changing approaches and bringing a degree of risk and reward into the equation.
There are exciting times ahead, and with more competition from both within and outside the sector, only the toughest and bravest museums will survive. But with so much talent, there are huge opportunities to play for.
Rachel French is a cultural entrepreneur and was a participant in the British Museum’s Fresh Leads Development programme
