The Guimet Innovation Lab
The objective of the Guimet Innovation Lab is to collectively develop knowledge on social innovation in international museums. Specifically, it will work within a systemic and complex vision of change, contribute to the establishment of a community of innovative practices both in France and internationally, involve diverse stakeholders, foster their collaboration and develop skills on innovation in cultural institutions. Its actions are based on experimental methods to develop and disseminate social innovations from museums.
The national museum of Asian arts (MNAAG) - Guimet, an open place in essence, a "philosophical factory" to say it as Émile Guimet, its founder, said: the MNAAG, through a constantly renewed programme, is a privileged place of learning about Asia. With the creation of the Guimet Innovation Lab, the MNAAG offers an accessible discourse, less focused on a scholarly lesson in art history than on "the human being placed at the centre of exchanges. It invites us to imagine a museum that is always in motion, that is made, remade, and evolves, replacing a static, hieratic image".
This is the first time in France that a national museum has embarked on such a social innovation process to co-construct and share new ways of 'doing museum'.
Experimentation in iterative mode through strategic conversations between the museum team and researchers as well as other museums and stakeholders, collaboration and collective intelligence, and the contribution of qualitative research are the major tools of the Guimet Innovation Lab
The first online professional workshop offered by the Guimet Innovation Lab
The first online meeting of the Guimet Innovation Lab, will be held on Tuesday 30 March 2021 on the theme: "Engagement and digital formats: lessons from the pandemic"; through workshops, it examines innovative museum practices during the Covid19 crisis bringing together international and French museums on the involvement of audiences in new digital formats during the pandemic.
The workshop, led by Kedge's Creative Industries and Culture Centre of Expertise in partnership with SINApses Conseils and the Innovation and Culture Club, will examine in particular the agility of museums since the beginning of the crisis.
The museums present for this webinar are:
- Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
- MAMC, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, St Etienne Métropole
- Musée national des beaux-arts - Le MNBAQ, Quebec
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
- Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, Paris
- Musée de la civilisation, Quebec
- Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
- Mucem, Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, Marseille
- The National Gallery, London
The results of this collaborative work will be disseminated in academic and professional publications in 2021.
Actions of the Guimet Innovation Lab
The Guimet Innovation Lab will propose, among other actions, 2 annual webinars and an international conference in 2022.
The creation of this community space, open to museum practices around the world, and the acquisition of scientific knowledge will enable transformative actions to be offered in the field in an interrelated manner. Innovation and practices of today and tomorrow can be shared.
From 2022, the Guimet Innovation Lab will welcome students from the Franco-Chinese Institute of Art and Design Management, which is the result of a partnership between CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), one of the world's leading art schools, and Kedge Business School, to join in this social innovation approach.
