Smart, open, user innovation and competitive advantage: a model for museums and heritage sites

The aim of this paper is to analyze the meanings and the contents of innovation and its role in museums and heritage sites’ management to create higher levels of competitiveness. Through a complex framework, we investigate the key role of innovation in determining the competitive advantage. We propose a theoretical model to study smart and open innovation in cultural services, with specific reference to museums and heritage sites, building up an ‘innovation indicator’, in order to measure the nature and the intensity of innovation as well as to identify how it can be leveraged to sustain a business-oriented approach and to get competitive advantage. This latter is conceived in strategic terms, using a resource-based theory approach: competitive advantage is therefore considered with respect to both economic and social performance, market and competitive positioning. We apply our index on a group of innovative selected cases of museums and heritage sites using nonlinear principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering. Empirical results show that smart innovation seems to be a necessary path to achieve competitive parity but it is not sufficient for competitive advantage