By Tom Kelley

This article was published in Museum News March/April 2003.

What happens when you combine an anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical ideology with a spirit of wild creativity and a techie’s love of gadgetry? You get IDEO, the California-based company many call the world’s leading design and development firm, creators of the Apple mouse, Polaroid’s I-Zone camera, the Palm handheld organizer, and a pile of other innovative products and services. IDEO’s general manager shares some thoughts about museums and how they might practice a little of the artof innovation.

One doesn’t have to be a museum insider these days to notice that the industry is experiencing significant financial and cultural challenges as it juggles tradition and innovation on the way toward an uncertain future. As a member of several museums in the San Francisco Bay area, I’ve witnessed a recent fever-pitch of calls and letters, suggesting that fund raising is now more of an issue than ever. When participants at an American Association of Museums seminar last November were asked to write imaginary headlines about the future of their museums, many of the responses were about mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, and bankruptcies, so money issues were clearly top-of-mind. And while the media always favor newer, high-profile museums like the Guggenheim Bilbao, the J. Paul Getty Museum, or the Experience Music Project, most museum administrators are quietly working to maintain and strengthen their institutions despite highly constrained resources.

New challenges demand new solutions, which suggests looking for good ideas beyond the borders of any one organization, industry, or culture. Linus Pauling, the Nobel Laureate chemist, once said that the best way to come up with a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. Which of course begs the question, “Where do you find a lot of ideas?” My firm, IDEO, has spent a good part of the last 20 years pondering that question as we have worked on thousands of innovation-related programs for our clients. The short answer, for us at least, is to use small, highly motivated groups of bright, energetic people who get a spark of inspiration from outside the group and then relentlessly brainstorm and prototype their way through many small failures on the way to success. It took me almost 300 pages to tell the long version of that story in my book, The Art of Innovation, so I won’t try to squeeze it all into this brief article. Instead, I’d like to focus just on the “outside spark,” the idea of cross-pollination, of “borrowing” innovation from beyond your walls. You might call it “innovation from the outside in.”

Museums as Location-Based Entertainment

One place museums might look for cross-pollination is the more light-hearted world of location-based-entertainment, better known as “theme parks.” Although Disneyland has many competitors, it still reigns supreme as the quintessential theme park in America. Through a carefully engineered blend of architecture, design, hiring, training, and choreography, Disney has delivered a remarkably consistent and positive experience day after day for 48 years. Despite the negative connotations the name Disney holds for some museum professionals, I believe that almost any business in America could learn from Disneyland’s model. What’s particularly interesting for museums, however, is the way Disney uses its location as a hub for a much larger empire. The Disney theme parks are inextricably linked to Disney characters, its retail stores, licensed products, movies, and software. Visiting Disneyland makes my family more likely to buy Disney products and watch Disney movies, which in turn make us want to visit Disneyland again. While nearly every museum has a retail shop and a growing percentage have mail-order or Web-based catalogs, the museum network, and the revenue opportunities, too often still end at the front door.

What if visitors leave your museum hungry for more? I personally am in sensory overload after about two hours in a museum, regardless of whether the subject is art, culture, science, or history. Not that I’ve really had enough. Just enough for one dose. Tomorrow morning I may want to learn more about what I saw and experienced in your museum, either to simply recall something that slipped my mind (“What was the name of that guy who created the early computer I saw yesterday?”) or to learn more than I did during the first dose (“I really liked the watercolor in the west gallery. Do you have more works by that artist or her contemporaries?”). Disney has always given me plenty of opportunity to reinforce my Disneyland experience back home, while generating income it can use to fuel further innovations.

What is the equivalent for museums? If I loved your museum during my visit, could you find a way to help me share the experience with my friends? Could you help me compile my own personal highlights from the visit? Could you use your brand somehow to help me express myself—not simply with a logo sweatshirt, but with products or clothing or media or accessories that make me feel like “part of the club” that your museum represents? Could you help me with a simple do-it-yourself version of your museum content, whether that means creating my own physics experiments or casting my own sculptures?

Try thinking of the museum as the hub of a large network, and see where that thought leads. Hopefully it will spark some new ideas for ways to influence the community, spread the word, and generate new revenue to fund your next idea.

Museums andthe Learning Journey

As IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge often tells our designers, “Think verbs, not nouns.” What Bill means is, Don’t give in to the temptation of focusing only on the nouns, the physical things your organization creates or offers its customers, such as objects, architecture, etc. He believes that organizations can create more appealing offerings, more loyal customers, and more enduring brands if they focus instead on the verbs, the actions, the experiences that happen before, during, and after contact with the nouns. Companies who take this to heart have recently started mapping the customer journey for people who buy their goods and services.

For example, we recently worked on mapping the customer journey for a hospital emergency room in St. Louis. Hospitals, like museums, are now faced with intense cost pressure and increasing competition for their customers’ attention. What we found in mapping the steps in the emergency room journey was that patients in that high-stress environment really just wanted more information. They wanted to be reassured. They wanted a bit more “navigation” to tell them where they were in the process, who would see them next, and when they would be finished. Once we discovered that latent customer need, we found low-cost ways to smooth their journey, and the patient experience has noticeably improved.

In museums, it might be useful to think of a learning journey. If learning is one of the key reasons to visit a museum, then what are the steps in the process? What information gets me to the museum in the first place? How do I know where to start? What attracts me to a particular exhibit? What is the appropriate balance between experiencing the exhibit and reading/listening for more information about it? How can you simultaneously make it interesting to the novice and the more informed visitor? Many museums use audio guides for a more in-depth experience that goes beyond browsing. Is there an alternative that delivers a better, quicker, richer, or more entertaining experience? Is there a way to deliver more “take-home” value, more persistence of memory? What factors determine when I am ready to leave? (Fatigue? Schedule? Sensory overload? Attention span?) By analogy, department stores have recently discovered that customers stay longer and buy more if they have a shopping cart. Is there a metaphorical equivalent for museums?

It might be instructive for all museum staff—not just visitor evaluation specialists—to find some time to carefully watch your customers’ journeys, especially first-time visitors. How do they arrive? Where do they park? Does anyone get temporarily lost on the way in? Anyone have trouble finding the ticket counter or the information booth? Speaking of the information booth, what questions get asked most often (besides “Where are the restrooms?”)? Can you find a friendly way to answer those questions before they get asked? What sequence do visitors follow through the museum? Can you discern what leads some to the retail store and not others? Deliver a better customer journey, and your customers will find a way to reward you: through more return visits, better word of mouth, increased membership, and adding more value to your reputation.

Museum Sleuthing

Software and toy companies have created a multi-billion-dollar industry with programs that combine education and play. There are probably schoolchildren in American who learn more about geography from “Carmen San Diego” than they do from their grade-school teachers. Why? Because that tremendously successful software program turns learning into a fast-paced detective game instead of trying to deliver the material in traditional, linear textbook form. Might kids (and adults for that matter) have fun as amateur sleuths, searching the museum for answers to questions of varying difficulty? They could choose from a selection of “treasure maps” at the information desk, and set out  through the museum to look for answers. The treasure hunt game could be set up so that kids learn a lot about the exhibits as they search for pieces in the puzzle. Docents and security staff could be in on the game, and authorized to give out extra clues. Like a computer game, players could gradually work their way up through different levels of difficulty. Also like computer games, there could be some symbolic or nominal prize for reaching a certain level (a special stamp for your museum “passport,” a free pass to a special exhibition, an entry in a monthly drawing for a $50 gift certificate at the museum shop, etc.).

Creating a whole new way to visit the museum might cause locals to visit more often, making them more likely to become members. If the change is newsworthy, the resulting media coverage might help new visitors (local and out-of-town) learn about your museum for the first time. And the new, more playful approach might cause more young people to visit, some of whom will become museum-goers for life.

Frequent-Visitor Programs

Although the U.S. airline industry is currently going through tough times, it has had some very successful innovations over the years. One revolutionary but now familiar innovation pioneered by Bob Crandall at American Airlines in 1981 was the frequent-flier program. The idea was an instant success and was embraced both by airlines and their customers. As you have probably observed or experienced, frequent-flier programs are powerfully persuasive influences for many people when deciding which airline to fly.

What’s the museum equivalent? You probably already have one frequent-visitor program, of course. It’s called “membership,” and typically allows unlimited visits during the year as one of its benefits. Is there still more opportunity for application of this concept? For example, could a science museum team up with other science museums around the country and offer some kind of national “frequent-visitor” program? Once you create such a program, the next step would be to establish “elite” status, to reward your most avid (or most revenue-generating) visitors.

In larger urban areas, are there other opportunities for collaboration within your city? For example, Paris has a beautifully designed museum pass that not only offers visitors a way to save money on admissions but also lets them bypass the ticket lines. Do museums lose money on the program? I doubt it. For one thing, payment is in advance, even if the purchaser never visits a single museum. And it encourages visitors to “discover” some of the lesser-known museums in town that they might otherwise miss.

A Different View of theCollection

The semiconductor industry has “fabless” chip companies (i.e., they don’t fabricate their own chips), and there are consumer product companies with no manufacturing plants. Both are examples of what the business world calls “de-verticalization.” Amazon sells more books than anyone in America without a single bookstore. The best interest rates on certificates of deposit these days are from banks without a single teller. What is the equivalent for museums? Is it unthinkable to imagine that a museum could live without a building? When I was a student at Oberlin College, the Allen Art Museum there had a relatively large art loan/rental program. Taking that idea further—much further, perhaps—could a museum make its entire collection available for rental to institutions and organizations that would be willing to protect, insure, and display them? Could museums without buildings team up with organizations that have no permanent collections, such as the delightful curated exhibitions—all temporary—at San Francisco Airport?

If that idea goes too far, what about the huge unused part of the museum’s collection? Every time I hear about a wealthy individual with multiple homes around the world—all in desirable locations—I think what a shame it is that some of the nicest residential properties in the world sit empty over 50 percent of the time. That waste of real estate however is nothing compared to the untapped collections in museums around the world. Institutions ranging from the Yale Peabody Museum to the London Transport Museum report that they can display less than 1 percent of their total collections. Less than 1 percent! The remaining 99 percent not only goes unseen by the public but also incurs costs to the institutions to keep them stored, guarded, and insured in perpetuity. If the collection is truly “museum quality,” then is there literally no demand for displaying them somewhere in the world? Could items even be leased to private collectors, with a bond posted to ensure that they would be returned to the museum if and when they were needed for an exhibition? In short, are some “assets” in the collection not actually liabilities, and is there not some way to recapture their value?

The Future Has Already Arrived

Science fiction writer William Gibson, who wrote the novel Neuromancer and coined the word “cyberspace,” once said that “the future has already arrived; it’s just not widely distributed yet.” If you take his idea to heart, it means you don’t always have to invent the future of your museum yourself. You can look around the world for places where your future already exists and search for a practical, cost-effective way to apply it at home. For example, the CD-ROM-based Museum Exhibit Guides at the Experience Music Project in Seattle provide an opportunity for visitors to hear as much or as little detail about exhibits as they like. Undoubtedly the contents of your exhibits are different from EMP’s, but the customer-oriented learning device would be widely applicable.

Do long lines form at your museum in peak periods or during popular exhibits? There’s always a long line at my local movie theater too on a Saturday night, but I don’t wait in it anymore. That’s because at crowded times or for popular movies, I always buy tickets in advance via Fandango, a Web-based booking service that lets me print a bar-coded ticket at home. Simple and easy for me. Costs me a dollar a ticket, which I am happy to pay for the convenience. Like electronic bridge toll payment systems, it’s faster and better for both the customer and the service provider.

And what about the digital version of your collection? The stylish Redwood Room in San Francisco’s newly redesigned Clift Hotel features six large electronic picture frames on its paneled walls. Often the frames display a luminous high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, as a reminder of the physical painting that once hung there. Several times an hour, however, a new image will appear in the frame, not often enough for visitors to want to sit and watch it like a slide show, but often enough to add interest and variety. As the future cost of such large plasma displays moves down and the quality of the images continuously increases, wouldn’t such electronic picture frames be a great way to extend or promote your shows? And wouldn’t some corporations be willing to pay for the right to display high-quality digital versions of such popular works temporarily in their lobbies, serving as tasteful “previews of coming attractions” or digital advertisements for the exhibitions at a nearby museum?

My perception is that the world of museums is less competitive, more collegial than the corporate world, which means there are fewer barriers to learning from the best of class. Look around town or around the world for a place that might represent your future, and then see if you can move in that direction yourself. Maybe you can push the idea even further, or adapt it to the unique circumstances of your museum.

Look Beyond the Walls

Need some breakthroughs to help your institution succeed or even survive? Look beyond your walls. Study how fashion houses or consumer product companies build and renew their brands, because you certainly have a brand, whether you are actively managing it or not. Look at how sports franchises blend corporate, community, media, and customer support to finance their ever-growing expenditures, since fund raising is an area where new ideas are needed. Consider the science of shopping as applied by your favorite retailer to see if you could deliver an experience that delights your visitors in a way that makes them learn more, spend more, or return more often. Remain open to the possibility of gaining more value from your collection, your facility, or your brand, even if it means “rocking the boat” among your peers.

Tom Kelley is general manager of IDEO, a design firm that is rewriting the rules of organizational creativity. He will deliver the keynote address at the AAM Annual Meeting in Portland, Oreg., on Tuesday, May 20, 2003.