Recent research on value co-creation has recognized the importance of digital technologies and digital platforms in adding efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability to value co-creation. The availability of new and advanced digital technologies has also pervaded the mechanisms at the core of value co-creation, facilitating the interactions among spatially, temporally, and organizationally dispersed actors. Research has associated the ecosystem perspective with digital platforms underlining their potential in facilitating a multi-actor long-lasting online resource integration. To contribute to the debate on the digital value co-creation, this study has been based on the analysis of a specific service domain such as the cultural heritage, with a focus on museums. This study approaching museum digital transformation according to ecosystem perspective aims at better understanding how digital platforms boost resource integration, exploiting the value that networked ecosystem actors co-create digitally, enhancing museums' resources protection, research, exploitation, and utilization.
Top1. Introduction
Over the years, sustainability has gained momentum in many disciplines, which have offered several and sometimes different definitions (Navarro-Espigares et al., 2012; Ioannou & Serafeim, 2017). Drawing on the need to go beyond the extant fragmentation in sustainability research, scholars (Wolfson et al., 2015) have emphasized the need for a multidimensional and multidisciplinary approach that boosts socio-economic actors’ (e.g., institutions, organizations, and individuals) willingness to act as “suppliers of sustainability” (Font & McCabe, 2017). This refers to their disposition to participate in resource integration processes (i.e., natural resources, knowledge, information, technologies, etc.), essential for ensuring mutual and long-lasting well-being (Iandolo & Cosimato, 2019). Moreover, the engagement of these socio-economic actors in resource integration processes is one of the main pillars of value co-creation (Payne et al. 2008; Grönroos, 2011; Grönroos & Ravald, 2011).
Drawing on these considerations, this chapter is aimed at better understanding the contribution of digital platforms to the shaping, development, and sustainability of museum ecosystems. In doing so, an interesting application of systems approach inspired the analysis, according to which “in Europe today there is a movement toward contextualizing sites and monuments as part of a larger whole [...] —the historic environment—and toward a realization that the sustainability of that larger whole, rather than the conservation of individual monuments or sites, is a key objective of heritage resource management.” (Willems 2014, p. 216). This shed light on the inner complexity of cultural heritage and its sub-domains, such as museums, due to the number of buildings, sites, and artifacts that can be managed according to their “multiple economic, social, environmental and cultural support” (Van Balen, 2017, p.703). It follows that a system approach can support a better understanding of the dynamics and the interactions between the holistic components or actors in time and space. These interactions contribute to the ongoing evolution of knowledge and skills essential for ensuring to all cultural heritage system actors’ competitiveness, productivity, innovativeness, and a sustainable development (Barile et al., 2012).
Recent research on value co-creation has recognized the importance of digital technologies (e.g., digital platforms, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, machine learning, blockchain technologies, etc.) on the mechanisms at the core of value co-creation (Sashi, 2021). This is mainly due to their ability in contributing to address the current society’s grand challenges related to social justice and environmental protection (Pernici et al., 2012; Becker et al. 2015; Sachs et al., 2019). In particular, digital platforms act as a prime resource integrator able to facilitate the interactions among spatially, temporally, and organizationally dispersed actors (Storbaka et al., 2016; Ciasullo et al., 2018; Blaschke et al., 2019). This ability comes from the inner networked nature of digital technologies, which boost “the emergence of globally-connected digital infrastructures as socio-technical systems” (Blaschke et al., 2019, p.445), in which digital value co-creation processes occur, adding not only efficiency and effectiveness to this process (Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2016; Nambisan et al., 2019; Barile et al., 2021) but also sustainability (Gregori & Holzmann, 2020; Stegmann et al., 2021).