Innovate: Transforming Museum Practice Programme
Innovate is a new programme designed to provide you with the tools and methodologies to integrate innovation into your professional practice. We are looking for people from medium to large museums in the North of England who would like to enhance the way they work to be more customer focused and sustainable.
Delivered by Dr. Jo North, Associate Tutor at the University of York, this is an intensive programme over 2 days, 6 and 27 March 2025 at the Bar Convent in York. Participants need to commit to attending both days, and there is a 30-minute briefing before session 1 and work to do between sessions.
Session 1 ‘Innovate’ will explore what is meant by innovation, sustainable business models and design thinking tools to help you apply innovation methodologies into your museum’s everyday work. At the end of this session, you will have worked up some innovation ideas and plans for your organisation.
Session 2 ‘Transform’ will explore how to put innovation plans into action within the context of your museum’s specific opportunities and challenges.
Who is this programme designed for?
This programme is designed to benefit medium to large scale organisations. The characteristics below should help you identify if this is right for you:
Critical Mass: You must be able to dedicate time and effort to understanding and implementing innovation methodologies. This will take time, and we want to be confident that both your museum and MD North will get a return on investment.
Open to Change: We don’t expect you to be an expert in business or innovation theory. We do expect you to be curious and ask, ‘how might we?…’.
Visitor, Customer, Community or Audience Insights: Successful innovation is often built on a robust understanding of users or customers. We expect you to understand your visitors and key ‘customers’, be they internal or external.
Agency and Leadership Buy-In: This is not a ‘training course’ for personal development. We expect you to be able to make change in your museum and implement ideas. You must either have authority to do this yourself or have commitment from your organisation to implement changes.
If you are interested in joining this programme, then please complete this Expression of Interest by 17 January 2025.