Core functions, visitor friendliness and digitalisation: a comparative analysis of corporate museums’ performance

We exploit a rich dataset on Italian museums to investigate whether corporate museums’ service provision is quantitatively diferent from the provision by the rest of private museums and by the three diferent types of Italian publicly owned museums (whose classifcation 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 efects. 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 frm. Corporate museums’ higher levels of digitalisation may be seen as the effect of a knowledge spillover between the more proft-oriented business world and the non-proft cultural sector.