Museums and Wellbeing Project

The Museums and Wellbeing Project (2011-2013) seeks to improve the service abilities of museums and the cultural heritage field from a customer-oriented perspective. The purpose of the project is to develop new kinds of management, process thinking and collaboration models for the museum sector, as well as tools for customer-oriented service creation. The project has two pilot locations,  Maritime Centre Vellamo in Kotka and Linnanniemi museums in Hämeenlinna, and it is governed by the Finnish National Board of Antiquities. Finnish Innovation Fund (Sitra) and the cities of Kotka and Hämeenlinna are taking part in the realisation of the project. The results of the pilot project will be freely available for utilisation throughout the Finnish museum sector.

The project seeks answers to the topical questions of: How to secure museum services as part of wellbeing services in a situation where the public economy is under increasing pressure? How can museums better meet their customers' diversifying needs and expectations? How to encourage the customers, along with those working in the sector and various service providers to develop services together? Is it possible to increase the importance of museums as a source of creative economy and innovations?

At both pilot sites of the project, museum services are provided by the state, the local authorities and other parties. This creates a fruitfull starting point for developing customer-oriented management and collaboration models. Customer-oriented ways of planning museum services are developed and tested together with museum personnel and customers. In addition the project also utilizes international comparison data on good practices in museums.   

The results of the project will be presented in the beginning of the year 2013 in regional workshops in Finland. The goal is to produce tools and ways for the whole museum field to plan services wich meet the customer needs as well as possible.

Maritime CentreVellamo. Photo: Jussi Tiainen	Linnanniemi museums in Hämeenlinna: Häme Castle, The Prison Museum, Hämeenlinna Historical Museums and The Artillery Museum of Finland. Photo: The Finnish National Board of Antiquities