Innovation – Page 5 – American Alliance of Museums

Help Build the Collections of The Universal Museum of Creative Matter!

By Elizabeth Merritt

If you got up right now and walked around your workplace/house/campus/neighborhood, what evidence would you find of small, mundane, creative acts? Why do I ask? I never thought I’d say this, but I am starting a museum. About …
The Backstory on Blobby

By Elizabeth Merritt

CFM’s recent post on natural history specimens as social media was wildly popular, attracting over 1,300 hits within one week. Given the evident fan base for Blobby (and Sue) it seems worth delving deeper into the story behind these …
Update on Empowering New Immigrants through Art

By Elizabeth Merritt

This week’s guest post is by Patricia Lannes, director of education at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y. Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums briefly profiles NCMA’s work with new immigrants. Patricia …
What is Innovation Anyway?

By Elizabeth Merritt

One of the goals AAM set for CFM is to “foster innovation.” Why? Because innovation is to museums’ survival what genetic variation is to evolution—a source of novelty, producing structures or strategies that succeed better than the old …
Creating the New

By Elizabeth Merritt

How many of you know of dysfunctional relationships between universities and museums? Hark–I hear a forest of hands rise across the land. Too often colleges and universities fail to take advantage of the resources in museums (their …
The Whole World a Museum?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Take a look at “Tales of Things,” an interesting website that launched this month. It’s part of the TOTeM project—“exploring social memory in the emerging Internet of Things.” This UK-based project …
Save Museums, Save the World?

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m cynic when it comes to slogans and tag lines. I basically agree with Ivan Levinson, who wrote that at best tag lines are “like a Japanese haiku – a highly concentrated form of expression that attempts to communicate an essence, a …
Report from the Future: The Cultural Museum 2.0

By Elizabeth Merritt

It’s a good thing about the future is unequally distributed (cf William Gibson)–that way your museum can learn from pioneer organizations that are adapting to trends that will affect you in five, ten or twenty years. Where do you …
Mapping the Future

By Elizabeth Merritt

The Institute for the Future and Business for Social Responsibility have released their Sustainability Outlook Map charting four potential stories of the future. The map explores ways of approaching challenges to the environmental, social …
What’s Innovation Look Like? And How Do You Measure It?

By Elizabeth Merritt

A few weeks ago, we used this spaceto invite museums to participate in the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University. Reminder: the LP Project is a national research initiative designed to identify the challenges facing …