The individual level focuses on the individual factors that may influence the decision-making and the execution of innovative activities in a museum. There are two main factors identified among the relevant literature: leadership and professionalism.
Leadership
Leadership measures the power, willingness and ability of decision-makers to initiate and/or adopt innovation. As Anderson (2004) asserted, “strong leadership is critical for leading a museum through any degree of institutional change, and visionary leadership is essential for leading a museum through fundamental change”. The studies on the impact of leadership on innovation in museums focus exclusively on the duration of leadership of leadership and the characteristic of leaders.
a. The duration of leadership
On the basis of an empirical survey of 400 museums and 25 museum directors in the United States, Noble (1989) examined the impact of turnover among museum directors on the kinds of innovation implemented in museums. He found that there was a curvilinear correlation between the length of service of museum directors and the rate of innovation. Medium-term stayers (4-6 years) tended to innovate more than short-term Stayers (1-3 years) and long-term stayers (7-10 years). Short-term stayer tended to innovate less whilst long-term stayers showed a decreasing tendency in the number of innovations. This phenomenon can be explained by innovation theory from a learning perspective. Innovation is an incremental learning process, wherein learning has a primary
role in generating new knowledge and disserminating that knowledge throughout the organization (Carlsson et al. 1976; Nelson & Winter 1982; Gieskes & van der Heijden 2004). Knowledge is accumulated with time. New directors have less knowledge on which to base innovation, and hence, they innovate less. This is also observed in our investigation – a new museum director who was appointed only five months before being interviewed commented:
“I have been committed to technological innovation since I have been in charge of the museum. We are working on a pilot experience with an APP for the museum, but it isn’t available yet. I have had some meetings about working with digitalization, 3D and augmented reality. Maybe the next few years (the museum will adopt these techniques).”
Meanwhile, the learning curve exerts a diminishing marginal utility once it has passed a certain point. Considering that innovation is an incremental conception that emphasizes “new arrival” (Castañer & Campos 2002), this diminishing marginal utility is embodied in the decreasing rate of innovation among long-serving managers.
Furthermore, the duration of leadership also affects the type of innovation. According to Noble's (1989) research, short-term stayers were more likely to innovate in Education/Interpretation, Administration, and Exhibits/Security areas whilst long-term stayers innovated more in the areas of Fund-Raising/Revenue Generation, Public Relations/ Marketing, Trustee and Volunteer Recruitment, and Training and Relationships. This can also be explained in terms of the learning perspective. Because of the lack of knowledge accumulation, museum innovation is characterized by radical innovations, such as the adoption of external innovation, arts and humanity research, and new product development that isn’t strictly reliant on accumulated knowledge. On the contrary, museums in the long term tend to turn to incremental innovation based on problem solving and the accumulation of knowledge as individual and organizational learning over time.
b. Characteristics of leaders
organizational players should not be overlooked as a factor correlated to innovation (Kimberly & Evanisko 1981; DiMaggio & Stenberg 1985; Castañer & Campos 2002). It has been observed that many cultural organizations like theaters have dual leadership structure – with the coexistence of an administrative director and an artistic director, both of whom are key decision- makers in the arts organizations. Administrative directors, typically are in charge of the management of the organization, are more likely to innovate in pursuit of improved organizational efficiency and profitability, whilst artistic directors, who are responsible for artistic activities, are more interested in innovations that enrich artistic quality and form. As a consequence, such arrangement of dual authorities result in conflicting goals, which further influence innovation within organizations. DiMaggio and Stenberg (1985) attributed this to the relative power that different directors enjoy. They stated that the greater the power of the administrative director over the artistic director, the less the theater innovated. But Castañer and Campos (2002) tended to explain this by the educational background and past experience that leaders had. They proposed that leaders who have primarily a managerial background were less likely to engage in artistic innovation than those who had an arts background, or both, artistic and managerial background.
It is reasonable to think that this explanation is also applicable in the museum context. Many museums also have dual leadership structures in day-to- day operations although the organizational structure of a museum is different from that of a theater. A typical museum can be divided into three divisions by functions, namely collections, activities and administration (Lord & Lord 1998, p40). Collections (research, conversation and documentation) and activities (exhibitions, education and publications) are key functions akin to a theater’s artistic activities that relate to cultural production, which reflected in the parallel
structure adopted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whereby
collections and activities are under the supervision of a director and the administration is the responsibility of the president (Chekova 2004). Such division of power is also reflected in the division of labor between museum managers and curators seen in other literature (Zolberg 1986; Camarero et al. 2015). To this end, the weight of power, educational background, and past
experience of decision-makers is regarded as an important factor in museum innovation. It is proposed that the greater the power of decision-makers from the administration division (i.e. president or managers) over the that of the decision- makers in collections and activities divisions (i.e. director or curator), the less the involvement of a museum in cultural innovation; decision-makers with a preeminently managerial background and skills are less likely to engage in cultural innovation than those with an arts or humanistic background, or with both, arts and humanistic and managerial background.
Professionalization
Professionalism measures the capacity of museum staff to implement innovation. From the knowledge-based perspective, knowledge creation is an individual activity and the primary role of a firm is to integrate the specialized knowledge possessed by individuals into the production of goods and services (Grant 1996). Because innovation can be viewed as a process of creation of knowledge (Carlsson et al. 1976; Nelson & Winter 1982; Gieskes & van der Heijden 2004), individuals constitute the subjects of innovation and organizational innovation is essentially reliant on innovative activities by individual professionals. The extent to which an organization innovates depends on the extent to which this organization can integrate the specialized knowledge of its individual employees.
This deduction is corroborated by an empirical study conducted by De- Miguel-molina et al. (2013) on the identification of drivers of technological and cultural innovation involved in the restoration department of 167 museums throughout the world. They confirmed that the variety and combination of technologies and knowledge bases were positively correlated with the number of innovations. But they argued that the impact of the diversity of knowledge on innovation was indirect because museum size determined the amount and diversity of knowledge that a museum hosted. Therefore, they thought that size was the decisive factor. The impact of size on innovation is to be discussed in more detail below.
However, it is plausible that the influence of size on the diversity of knowledge base is over-estimated. This is because size is not a sufficient and necessary condition for diversity in knowledge. Firstly, the stock of knowledge
that a large museum hosts may be homogeneous rather than diverse; secondly, training can also improve the diversity of knowledge base by learning different technologies and knowledge without increasing the number of museum staff. For this reason, it is proposed that there is a positive correlation between the diversity of knowledge and the extent to which museums innovate; training programs can improve the diversity of knowledge, thus indirectly affecting the number of museum innovations.