Chiara Dalle Nogare

We exploit a rich dataset on Italian museums to investigate whether corporate museums’ service provision is quantitatively different from the provision by the rest of private museums and by the three different types of Italian publicly owned museums (whose classification is by organisational mode: traditional, autonomous, and outsourced). We consider service provision in the dimensions of core museum functions (research, collection management, dissemination) and visitor friendliness, and we also focus on digital services. We use count data models estimation methods and include controls referring to museums’ characteristics and contextual factors to account for possible confounding effects. Our analysis reveals that corporate museums do not provide more core services than other museums, as expected given the public good component of this category of services. Contrary to expectations, we find that corporate museums are not among the museums providing the largest number of services enhancing visitor friendliness. Finally, corporate museums provide more digital services than traditional public museums and private museums owned by churches, and not less than other museum types. We argue that this latter evidence may come from their interaction with the parent firm. Corporate museums’ higher levels of digitalisation may be seen as the effect of a knowledge spillover between the more profit-oriented business world and the non-profit cultural sector.

Quality data on tourist behaviour is essential for destination management organisations, the promoters of smart destination cards (SDC). The different configurations of SDC stem from the relative importance attributed to their goals and entail different levels of quality of the data they collect. SDC are not only big data generators, but also marketing tools and the outcome of the cooperative games between the included attractions, with a trade‐off between these features. Consequently, strong sample selection, price distortion effects, and collection of limited personal details on card users often characterize SDC data. We propose a checklist for assessing the potential of SDC as big data generators, whose items are: large coverage of diverse attractions; same discount for all included attractions; low card price; stability of features over time; collection of personal data at issue. We exemplify its use by applying it to the SDC of Trentino, an Italian mountain destination.

The recent narrative on museums as catalysts of innovation and growth considers their relations with other cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to be very important. We argue that most relations museums establish with CCI firms and institutions are unlikely to produce strong positive externalities that make the latter more innovative. To prove this claim, we propose a conceptual framework qualifying project-based and supply chain relations between museums and CCIs as either strong, moderate, or weak links, according to their potential in terms of knowledge spillovers from museums to CCIs. We apply this taxonomy to data collected from 261 Polish museums. Our findings indicate that strong links are outnumbered by moderate and weak ones. We then suggest that the traditional missions of museums, in particular education and conservation, need to be more thoroughly assessed in terms of their direct and indirect contributions in order to fully capture the impact of museums on innovation in the wider economy.

We present a model where museum commitment to immigrant integration is conditioned by the possible negative reactions of native visitors and patrons. We then exploit the rich information provided by the 2015 Italian museum census to investigate the factors associated with a higher probability of museums developing promotion programmes targeting an immigrant audience, with a special focus on the size of immigrant communities and the importance of anti‐immigrant sentiment in the local context. We proxy the latter with the municipal vote shares of parties with an anti‐immigrant agenda in the 2013 national elections. Our evidence shows that the vote share of Lega Nord has a significantly negative and sizable estimated coefficient. Conversely, we find no positive association with the overall share of immigrants—only the size of specific minorities at the local level increases the likelihood that a museum engages immigrants. We control for a number of context variables and specific museum characteristics, some of which (age of establishment, type of collection) show a positive association with museum commitment to immigrant integration.

Destination cards are popular means to promote attractions, events, and consumption. This research aims to investigate tourists' preferences by identifying the most common sequences of activities recorded by a destination card. We use pattern recognition and cluster analysis techniques. Evidence shows that most tourists prioritize outdoors moderately engaging activities, that there is a love for variety, and that cultural tourists are the only relevant group characterized by choosing activities belonging to the same type (indoors‐intellectual engagement) along the engagement‐leisure scale.