From a Digital Marketing & Business MBA to Museovation (#1)
Here is the transcript of my long interview by Chloé Louis, herself crazy about art, museums and heritage. Due to our common interest in digital transformation, we discussed about my journey from a Digital Marketing & Business MBA to the foundation of Museovation dealing with digital transformation in museums (part I ), taking into account differences of perspective on that matter between French museums and others. In the second part of this interview, you will find my views on what is at stake in open innovation for the cultural field with some examples. I hope you will find some food for thoughts and that you would be happy to engage in conversation on the different topics covered.
First, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your career?
I enjoy saying that I was made for this DMB MBA career path. Elisa, which is short for Elisabeth, is not only my first name, but the one of the first chatbot (Eliza) born in 1966 two years after me, and also the first name of one of our greatest pieces of art (Mona) Lisa. It was definitely my destiny to study the digital transformation of museums!
More seriously I have a double school career. I have a Master of Science in Marketing Management from ESSEC Business school and I studied at the same time History of Arts at the Ecole du Louvre, which was quite atypical in the 80s. Thus, I have always had a critical look on art but from a business angle, an idea which is rather frowned upon by the French museums world.
I started my professional career in the cosmetics industry and luxury goods with L’Oréal, which has been a large part of my professional life. I was also the managing partner of a consulting firm specialized in the creation of derived items from museums (L’Officiel des Musées). The goal was to support museums in a period during which they had to generate new sources of income. But dealing with the question of business was quite tricky in the 90’s in French cultural world. I quickly reached the conclusion that France was not ready. There was a discrepancy between what was claimed and what was actually carried out. The situation was complex. The company should have developed on an international level so as to be economically viable on a long term.
Thus, I came back to my first love, perfume and jewelry. I have always enjoyed working on goods with strong added value, goods with a universe and a history. On the other hand, museums are essentially great story-tellers but not always able to transform those stories into incomes so as to carry out their global mission.
Why did you specifically choose the DMB MBA from EFAP?
I enrolled to this DMB MBA because I was looking for:
1) An analytic degree course on digital strategy while wanting as well to share inter-field experiences. I didn’t want to practice tools for technological purposes only. This is one of the main principals I learnt during this DMB MBA. With the digital world, we are constantly changing technologies. It’s better to understand the process than to try to specialized in one technology in particular, specifically regarding my previous marketing skills.
2) How to leverage a strong sense of inquisitiveness. That was what expected from us during this year. That definitely corresponded to my personality. You plunge into a 360-degree ecosystem. You learn where to find the information, you identify the tools so as to reactivate them later when required. In the digital world, you may have to face any situation. It is true in all fields and culture is not spared.
Your thesis is quite logically on the digitalization of museums. Can you tell us more about that?
The original title of my thesis was: IRL Museums v URL Museums, warring brothers or Siamese brothers? Then, a sub heading quickly imposed itself: The stakes of open innovation in museums. This dividing approach comes exactly from the way I tackled my research.
During my year at the MBA, when I attended numerous museums professional lectures (more than 45 in 14 months!), I could assert that the IRL museum potentially mastered the first step of its digitalizing process: collections had been digitalized since the 1990’s, active engagement in social media and very effective websites are the norm, digital tools inside the galleries are common. And yet, things were different as far as its numerous URL versions were concerned as they were no longer managed by the museum itself but in partnership.
The more I got into my research, the more I came to realize how crucial the question of open innovation in museums was (i.e. the relationship that the IRL museum has with all these new cultural actors).
Today, these actors who have their own agenda regularly knock at the door of museums. Do these agendas fit them? Nothing is less certain. At one moment or another, is the value that these actors seek in museums economically returned to them? Indeed, the stakes do not boil down to a worldwide visibility of collections (even if it’ s crucial nowadays). There is also a financial issue at a time when subsidies are shrinking in museums.
What has the DBM brought to you on this digital experience? How do you see the exchanges between sectors in this process of digital transformation?
I think that thanks to the DMB MBA I have developed methodologies and found tools to tackle the digital transformation of every sector and mainly the one of museums. All that thanks to the plurality of approaches of its teachers and masterclass instructors, who came from very different economic sectors or related to various digital sectors. That was a real 360° movement over a year. Nothing is taken for granted in this world, what was true yesterday will no longer be so tomorrow. I have learnt to be constantly aware about what was going on somewhere else even, if it sounds very far from my field at the beginning.
All the contributors have helped us understand how to bridge the gap between disciplines and industries. For instance, customer management at Air France involves yield management or customer services issues that can be similar to the management of a museum visitor. Besides, some museums such as Rodin Museum are starting to engage people coming from these sectors. It is therefore interesting to look for, in terms of communication and tools, what I can transfer to my field of expertise.
On the other hand, I would like the private sector to understand that museums are far ahead of the curve on sociological issues such as the representativeness of genres, cultures, economic origins, in a word, the consideration of diversity, notions of inclusions, the plurality of values that are currently sorely lacking in the field of artificial intelligence for instance. These are daily questions in museums and at their many conferences. They therefore have a real expertise on this subject that could be used to address technological issues.
The GAFAM have come to realize how important it was. During the latest Web Summit in Lisbon October 2018, Brad Smith, president of Microsoft Cooperation, began his speech saying that from now on they will recrute profils coming from Liberal Arts and Human Sciences:
« Social Sciences become important every day. […] We need engineers, we need data scientist, we need people who come from Liberals Arts who know how to work and interact with people. A data scientist might need to have a Liberal Arts background, any student who is a history major, a political science major or another Liberal Arts major, please take a computer science course… in order to prevent bias in programs … and create ethical guidelines » Brad Smith, President Microsoft Corporation
But there are too few bridges between museums and the rest of the economic actors. Since September, the Georges Pompidou Center has put into place lectures aimed at CEOs called Pompidou Accélérations. That is a beginning. Let’s see whether this experience will spread over to other cultural institutions. Museums, especially in France, keep unfortunately shutting themselves in a regular time out of the secular economic time which would however need hindsight so crucial to analyze human history, sciences and nature in this period of great change.
This is most certainly due to the fact that in France we still have a superior and unprofitable conception of culture, even though if it’s changing a lot with younger generations in charge. In the United States, it’ s totally different. The museum must serve its community and must be its accurate image. They design a collection to serve the people who practice it. For instance, some famous American museums sell part of their collections because of financial constraints but others assume that if this collection does not serve the community and does not meet its needs, they can sell part of it. In France a collection is inalienable. The conception of a museum is very different.
It’ s a position which has also positive points. Who can claim that the needs of a living community around a museum will not evolve with time under the effect of massive migratory phenomena? The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon has rediscovered the richness of its Iznik ceramic collection thanks to a Turkish-speaking community quite recently established in Bron. If the museum had sold this collection to enrich a department on which it was already known, what would have happened to the new links with this neighboring community?
The societal stakes raised inside museums are fascinating and are all the more so when they are filtered through the challenges of digital transformation that is so overwhelming our societies. Now we all know that it is no more the lack of a technical knowhow that make us reluctant towards change but the lack of vision, a lack of flexibility and opened mind, both personal and societal.
According to you what are the main brakes and the main assets of French museums as far as their digital transformation is concerned?
We are in a society in constant test and learn process. We must not be afraid to go for it. The main asset of the French museum and heritage field is the high quality of its engineering. That is the reason why the Louvre Abu Dhabi was managed by the Louvre Paris and that the Pompidou Center is spreading over Belgium, Spain or China. From upstream towards downstream, France sets the bar very high, but this mustn’t be a brake to creativity. It can be sometimes very restrictive. Nothing is sacrificed, we are afraid to fail, and we then, deny ourselves any chance of trying new experiences.
We must accept to fail. Yet in France we don’t share failures. If one museum has failed in implementing an application or a mediation digital tool, or on a social media campaign, it must share it. However, currently, during lectures, people only speak about what has worked. Very few people dare account for reasons of their failure, which is not in the French way of thinking. However, it is the most interesting and most of all, the most constructive for one’ s peers. Failure must also be accepted by those who finance museums (i.e. pubic patrons). Testing, failing but learning does not mean wasting tax payers’ money!
Digital transformation lies also on the idea of training cultural teams and institutions about digital transformation. And yet, there is no MOOC in French specific to museums on that subject, whereas there are tons of them in English. In the speech about transmitting and sharing knowledge there is still a lot of progress to make if we compare ourselves with the English training programs such as “One by One” , the Culture 24 training program for the professionals working in the museum field in England. Yet we have a lot of people of good will, but they are no evangelized or trained enough. It would be interesting that the Ministère de la Culture creates a global participative ecosystem between French museums, universities, museums consultants and startups.
«I found the absence of cooperation between museums striking as compared to what I saw during the lectures I attended abroad.”
Elisabeth Gravil-Gilbert, Museovation founder
You attended the latest lecture Museum and the Web in Boston. How would you analyze the United States as opposed to France on those questions of digital transformation?
It was the second time that I attended this important conference for Museums. What keeps on striking me is that even small and middle-sized museums are strongly involved in their digital transformation. They think a lot about the infrastructure (data management, open source), new means of mediation in VR or AR, new applications without wifi connections, but also about social, environmental or ethical issues.
For example, large museums have just launched an AI commission to which they invite all types of goodwill, smaller museums and heritage institutions, economic partners or free-lance consultants (I am one of them). They have fully integrated the mechanisms of open innovation, porosity of borders, Co-creation, open-data. It is very exciting and enriching for the future of museums and heritage.
Finally, for Anglo-Saxon museums, the lack of financial ressources mustn’t be a barrier to innovation. It shouldn’t be a pretext to remain as they are. If a museum wants to carry out a project, it will always finds the funding to do so, it will actively seeking ways to monetize its data, it will think about a contract with a GAFAM or any other partner likely to meet its needs. No need to speak about their powerful fund raisers whose methods are frighteningly efficient. Thanks to this business-minded vision, they are much more agile than French museums, bogged down into public procurement constraints that are now totally outdated.
There is another major difference between France and the United States. Our tendency to imagine barriers rather than successes. For instance, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Chicago has embarked on a project to create holograms to perpetuate the words of the last survivors of the Holocaust, by recording their everlasting testimonies.
The idea is to maintain a spontaneous dialogue with a “human-being”, by asking him/her questions, which is much more instructive and striking than a history book. This novelty is both a mass of technology and a strong human and historical challenge.
“One of the most memorable things we have ever visited on vacation. Emotions were so raw…If I could have hugged Fritzie’s hologram, I would have. Her story will stay with me the rest of my life. Thank you all for creating such a tremendous remembrance for the world’s truest and bravest heroes.” Chantel Ogden Olsen
In Paris, the Museum of Jewish Art and History does not forward beyond the brake and is notably afraid of those revisionist groups, still too active, for whom these holograms would be a way to manipulate history, a way to broadcast fake news. These fears are totally legitimate, and we must ask ourselves these questions. But it could have been wiser to get rid of the brake coming from the revisionist groups instead of remaining paralyzed and doing nothing, while the last survivors from the Holocaust are dying away.
We have become civilizations of image and sound. From now on learning involves those two ways, so why no resorting to them? The blockchain could help certify the testimonies of the last survivors before they are transferred to the hologram. There would then be tangible evidence that the revisionist groups could not attack (at least from a legal point of view).
What are your projects after the MBA?
The stake is now for me to go from the MBA to the MVP (or Minimum Viable Product), launching Museovation, my own company. That requires a lot of energy, hard work and passion. I think that business creation is one of the paths that naturally follow after the DMB MBA by the EFAP. The year of the MBA is one during which you absorb up. You must be a permanent blotter. Then, after a few months, you start to sort out the fields you like, those in which you feel competent in. This is when you find the tools so as to bring your contribution.
Within Museovation, I want to develop three axes:
1) Digital transformation consulting for museums and cultural institutions: I will work hand in hand with complementary and more specialized skilled profiles to lead specific projects. It’s the advantage of the DMB MBA network.
2) Accompanying start-ups from the cultural field since they are also on hold, to better understand the problems museum face and more specially the ones abroad, to apprehend them better and thus serve them better.
3) Last will be an e-learning project. I form an outstanding team with another MBA graduate, called Veronique Moreau, specializing in learning and who founded the company, The Connecting Hub. Often in museums, the staff feel lonely in their own training. So, we will try to set up a blended-learning program (MOOC, webinar, live sessions). The first goal is to turn my thesis into a MOOC, to give back to the museum world what it has given me through the museum professionals I have been lucky enough to interview.
To finish with and because it’s the tradition at the DMB, what is your hashtag?
#Museovation of course, because it is the name of my company, but it is most of all a motto that I would be happy museums adopt for their digital transformation journey: « Let’s be Museovation !» (museum + innovation) and think out of the box as my logo engage you to do so !
This is also under this hashtag you will be able to follow this new project on Instagram, Facebook or under @ElisaGravil on Twitter.
