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The paper offers a comprehensive understanding of how digital transformation affects business models and how firms operate and compete effectively and successfully in a digital economy.

The research adopted an abductive approach (Dubois and Gadde, 2002) through constant movement between theory and empirical evidence. A systematic literature review led the first conceptual development and examples of practices from cultural heritage sectors were used in the theorizing process.

This paper depicts a digital model framework through a set of assumptions about how an organization creates and delivers value in an interconnected way by orchestrating new interactive processes, and providing experience propositions to customers, and about how value is framed in terms of economic, social and cultural outcomes.

The study contributes to the scientific debate by discussing the role of digital business models as enhancements more rather than replacements of traditional business models; it frames a digital business model as consisting of three main pillars: value orchestration, experience propositions and value sharing.

The evolving visitors' expectations and the unfolding digital transformation compel rethinking on the service offering of museums and cultural institutions. Although digitalization and people-centeredness are widely exploited to enhance the visiting experience, there is limited evidence of their implications on organizational attractiveness. The article investigates this issue, examining the service attributes that entice visitors.

The study collected secondary data from the latest census study by the Italian Institute of Statistics on museums and cultural institutions. Two hierarchical regression models have been run on a sample of large publicly owned organizations (n = 312) to identify the service factors that were most effective in attracting Italian and foreign visitors.

Museums and cultural institutions undergoing a digital transformation were more effective in attracting visitors. The delivery of virtual tours and online events captivated the Italian audience. Foreigners appreciated the opportunity to use applications augmenting the on-site visit.

Digitalization and people-centeredness improve the attractiveness of museums and cultural institutions. Using digital channels to engage visitors fosters their desire to interact with cultural heritage. Furthermore, digitalization enriches the on-site visit, expanding conventional services with virtuality. However, the adverse effects on cultural heritage should be carefully handled.

This study highlights the service attributes that add to the attractiveness of museums and cultural institutions, enabling them to engage visitors and improve the visiting experience.

The purpose of this research aims at extending the knowledge on whether and how universities include sustainability dimensions in managing their collections. Precisely, the study focusses on the creation of a university museum (UM), as an embryonic stage of life during which management concerns both strategic and operational issues.

Sustainability is envisioned as a multifaceted concept, composed of the economic, cultural, environmental and social dimensions. Resorting to an acknowledged theoretical model for sustainable development in museum management, a qualitative interpretative study is carried out, gathering data from multiple sources. The empirical setting is the University of Pavia, which has recently created a new Museum of Natural History (Kosmos).

Results highlight how sustainability dimensions intertwin in UM creation. Moreover, the economic dimension emerges as a basement for the others. Value for the community, expressed in economic terms, must be ensured in UMs creation as well as throughout its entire life, in order to support cultural, environmental and social sustainability.

Focussing on the embryonic stage of UMs life allowed to consider how sustainability is embedded in relevant strategic and operational decisions. Nevertheless, scholars are encouraged to replicate the study in other stages of UMs' life, in a way to provide insights on its dynamics.

University collections managers can benefit from this research by acknowledging the role played by the economic dimension of sustainability. Notwithstanding their mission, universities should pay attention to extracting economic value from the management of their collections, as a means to ensure innovative and sustainable management on the cultural, environmental and social respects. Furthermore, this research suggests how a higher education system is able to create a new museum by relying on interdisciplinary competencies, which support sustainability since the embryonic stage.

This research contributes to the cultural heritage management literature by proposing an updated version of the sustainable development model for museums, which highlights the different relevance of the sustainability dimensions with particular regard to the UM creation and management.

The study aims to provide a detailed definition of Destination Cultural Reputation while also exploring its impact on tourist satisfaction through an investigation of the dynamics between these two elements. Additionally, the potential moderating role of on-site engagement in sustainable activities has been investigated, examining whether satisfaction prompts tourists to exhibit behaviors such as the intention to return and recommend the cultural destination.

To achieve these objectives, a survey and a structural equation model, based on a sample of 647 visitors to an important UNESCO World Heritage site (i.e. Urbino), have been adopted.

Findings confirm tourists’ recognition of the destination’s cultural reputation, supporting its relationship with visitor satisfaction. Additionally, tourist satisfaction is positively associated with destination loyalty. However, on-site sustainable activities negatively moderate the relationship between destination reputation and tourist satisfaction. This suggests that a favorable cultural reputation should align with quality sustainable activities in the destination to prevent tourist dissatisfaction.

The paper offers valuable practical insights for destination managers and policymakers aiming to enhance appeal and sustainability.

The study contributes to enhancing the understanding of the complex relationship between reputation, satisfaction, and loyalty in cultural destinations. In addiction it measures the reputation of tourist destination through the specific cultural dimension.

Recommendation systems are widely used in tourism in order to provide people personalized suggestions that would make their trip memorable. Nowadays, mobile assisted guided tours based on recommendation services are used in museums to enhance visitors ’ experience. However, all those systems have been designed to target indoor or outdoor museum visits. Is it feasible to design a system that supports mobile services that connect a museum visit to artworks situated outdoor in the city environment? Is it possible to connect the artworks of a city center to the exhibits of a museum? In this work, we attempt to give a first answer to such questions proposing and implementing a set of services that connects the museum to the city public space. In order to show the strength of the implemented services, we present a basic usage scenario along with a first system evaluation showing positive results.

This paper presents a study of a system that allows remote and onsite visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. The remote visitors are older adults at a care home and their relatives and/or friends who are at the museum. The museum visits are interactive. Meaningful stories accompany the museum exhibits, and there’s an audio channel between onsite and remote visitors. The aim of the study is to determine whether the remote visitors, i.e. older adults are able to use such technology and to study the mediated sense of spatial presence, social closeness, engagement and enjoyment in the visit. This study discusses the relationship between these aspects and factors leading to a better remote experience for older adults.

This study has 14 onsite and 12 remote older adult participants. Standardized questionnaires measured the mediated sense of spatial presence, the experienced social closeness and the level of participants' engagement and enjoyment in the visit of the older adult participants and traced onsite visitors in their position during the visit. The audio logs were subjected to thematic content analysis.

The results show that older adults enjoy and engage in remote visits, and that there is a positive correlation between enjoyment, engagement and social closeness. The findings argue that both the audio channel and the interactive story are important for creating an affective virtual experience: the audio channel increases the sense of closeness, whereas the interactive story makes the visit more engaging, providing structure, direction and purpose to the visit.

This work advances the state of art in the domain of technologies for older adults and addresses the needs of this population to stay in contact with both people and places.

This article examines curatorial practices, both traditional and digital, in the Guizhou Provincial Museum’s ethnic exhibition to assess their effectiveness in representing ethnic minority cultures, fostering learning and inspiring curiosity about ethnic textiles and costumes and associated cultures. It also explores audience expectations concerning digital technology use in future exhibitions.

A mixed-methods approach was employed, where visitor data were collected through questionnaires, together with interviews with expert, museum professionals and ethnic minority textile practitioners. Their expertise proved instrumental in shaping the design of the study and enhancing the overall visitor experience, and thus fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of ethnic minority cultures.

Visitors were generally satisfied with the exhibition, valuing their educational experience on ethnic textiles and cultures. There is a notable demand for more immersive digital technologies in museum exhibitions. The study underscores the importance of participatory design with stakeholders, especially ethnic minority groups, for genuine and compelling cultural representation.

This study delves into the potentials of digital technologies in the curation of ethnic minority textiles, particularly for enhancing education and cultural communication. Ethnic textiles and costumes provide rich sensory experience, and they carry deep cultural significance, especially during festive occasions. Our findings bridge this gap; they offer insights for museums aiming to deepen the visitor experiences and understanding of ethnic cultures through the use of digital technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse museums and theme parks as a tourist package and how the proximity of airports to the city and public transport influence the development of this tourist package to stimulate tourism demand in cities.

Qualitative and quantitative indicators have been applied in our methodology to measure the most visited European theme parks and museums from 2012 to 2022. Moreover, the localisation of airports has allowed us to address the importance of theme parks and museums in cities and their regional economies.

The results suggest that the location of the city, entertainment complementary activity, airport proximity, intermodal passenger transport, air and train accessibility, tourism demand and supply, and a high concentration of population in cities have a high influence on the development of a tourist package that includes museums and theme parks to stimulate the tourism demand in European urban cities. London and Paris are two of the most visited cities in the world, and these are the most attractive European cities for tourists in terms of efficiency because tourists can optimize much better their space and time to visit the city’s tourist attractions during their holidays. Another important finding is that the public transport service plays an important role in museums and theme parks’ visits and the optimization of space-time for tourists when they are visiting a city and its tourist attractions on holidays, especially subways, trains and buses. Although time-space measures of accessibility in public transport in cities must be improved to optimize the time of the native population and tourists.

This research shows the complementary role of museums and theme parks as an attractive tourist package and an entertainment, cultural and educational activity to improve the quality of tourism supply and redistribute tourist flows in European countries. Moreover, there are limited studies that tackle the theme of parks and museums in a tourism context.

Public and private sector organisations are widely endorsing digital transformation processes, but little is known about the level of digitalisation of an organisation as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework to assess an organisation’s level of digital transformation as a whole, taking the field of museums as an exemplary case of application.

The framework draws upon a scoping literature review of studies examining dimensions, metrics and methods for the assessment of the digital transformation of organisations. The framework has been validated by applying it to a sample of 400 Italian museums and further interviews with museum directors.

The authors propose an assessment framework composed of five main dimensions: people, technology, process, customer and strategy and investment. These dimensions are further deployed in sub-dimensions measured through a set of questions. The weighted average of results per dimension and sub-dimension supported the development of a composite index of organisational digital readiness.

The developed framework contributes to the current debate on the measurement of an organisation’s level of digital transformation as a whole, and it can offer practitioners a managerial tool to assess the organisation’s digital readiness.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the future of the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in services experience provided by cultural institutions (e.g. museums, exhibition halls and cultural centres) from experts’, cultural tourists’ and users’ point of view under the Industry 5.0 approach.

The research was conducted using a qualitative approach, which was based on the analysis of the contents obtained from two roundtable discussions with experts and cultural tourists and users. A thematic analysis using NVivo was done to the data obtained.

From a futuristic Industry 5.0 approach, AI is considered to be more than a tool – it as an integral part of the entire experience. AI aids in connecting cultural institutions with users and is beneficial since it allows the institutions to get to know the users better and provide a more integrated and immersive experience. Furthermore, AI is critical in establishing a community and nurturing it daily.

The most important contribution of this research is the theoretical model focused on the user experience and AI application in services experiences of museums and cultural institutions from an Industry 5.0 approach. This model includes the visitors’ and managers’ points of view through the following dimensions: the pre-experience, experience and post-experience. This model is focused on human–AI coworking (HAIC) in museums and cultural institutions.