Co-Production Practices between Museums and Culture-Based Companies

In the last decades museums have been pushed to adopt a range of strategies to cope with an increasingly challenging environment. In response to evolving cultural policies, lack of public funds available, the need to respond to social demands and better relate with territory and communities, museums are seeking other ways of working, including building relationships with stakeholders, and creating a mixed economy of public and private collaboration. The paper focuses on what are the development opportunities and organisational impacts that take shape when a museum adopts a particular type of strategy: the co-production with culture-based companies. The study relates to the ongoing discussions about "the new museology", the development of participatory practices, public and private partnerships, "culture and business". An exploratory research was conducted through three cases of co-production between heritage museums and firms especially sensitive to cultural strategies and cooperation with cultural organizations