Corporate museums and performance measurement systems

Corporate museums are facilities where companies showcase their history and interests in a museum-like setting. Similarly to traditional museums, they pursue cultural, social and economic performance goals. Differently from traditional museums, they also seek high organizational performance, because of their connection with their parent company. Given this business affiliation, the current systems to trace performance in traditional museums appear inadequate. Despite this peculiarity, today there are no studies on performance measurement systems for corporate museums. The present study aims to fill this knowledge gap by exploring how to design a performance measurement system to measure corporate museum performance. A collaborative action research project with Museimpresa, the Italian National Association of Corporate Museums, led to this discussion on a comprehensive and modular performance measurement system for this sector. The paper also offers suggestions on the process and the roles for development, which practitioners could find helpful in future implementations.