Kelvingrove Museum

Introduction

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was the largest of Glascow’s museums and was the most visited museum in the United Kingdom. By the late 1980’s the current exhibits were not keeping pace with the interests of the current consumer audience. During this time, Julian Spalding was hired as the new director for the museum. He implemented a new interdisciplinary approach among the curators in an effort to reverse this trend. In addition, Julian hired Mark O’Neill to assist him in revitalizing the museum in a vastly innovative fashion. Together they collaborated with all the curators to make Kelvingrove relevant to its audience through an innovative storytelling exhibit platform. Julian and Mark were able to facilitate this rebirth of the museum due to the creative, collaborative interdisciplinary culture they developed with all the curators.

Something is considered innovative when it offers a significant improvement over a

product or process that is currently available in an established or mature market. Julian and Mark redefined the museum experience through their “storytelling design” exhibit structure and incorporated the 4P’s of innovations space. It offered its customers a new product not currently used in other museums and a new process of presenting the exhibits. In addition, they tailored their strategy and position to their target market. Finally, they offered a new thematic, interdisciplinary exhibit design paradigm model to their customer base to be envied from other museums. Innovations can occur incrementally or radically. Incremental innovation is essentially a product/process improvement that facilitates the concept of “doing what we do, but better” (Tidd and Bessant, 2009, p.27). Mark abandoned the classic traditional museum bureaucracy and involved all the curators in the incremental innovation process by allowing them to provide their own ideas to improve the exhibit flow of the museum. This was done through Mark’s innovative...