What does sustainability mean in a corporate museum? Learning from CUBO, Museo di Impresa del Gruppo Unipol

Corporate museums lay at the crossroad between business and cultural heritage. In academia they have been mainly studied as strategic assets which managers use with a means-end logic. Limited attention has been given to their social role, that of being a potential leverage in corporate sustainability agenda and, more importantly, at the service of society’s sustainable development. The present study aims to fill this knowledge gap by exploring how sustainability is framed and measured in a corporate museum. A collaborative action research project with CUBO, Museo d’impresa del Gruppo Unipol, led to the development of a performance measurement system to assess the museum’s sustainability performance, which takes on an exquisite social connotation, from which practitioners of this sector could take inspiration for future implementations.