Open Innovation Factory: The Innovation Potential of Heritage

ekip

The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) are at the forefront of technological innovation, often turning speculative ideas into transformative tools. To harness this potential, ekip’s Open Innovation Factories foster industry awareness of new methods for collaboration, ideation, and development, developed through ekip’s original research and policy initiatives. By bringing together creatives, technologists, and policymakers, Open Innovation Factories empower participants to shape vibrant, inclusive futures for the CCIs across Europe and beyond. In September 2025, as part of EU Creative Skills Week, we hosted an innovation factory on the topic of how cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) can be innovation powerhouses. Using design-led speculative thinking workshop methods, this innovation factory inspired participants to build bridges for creating a robust, innovation-ready cultural heritage sector for the future.

Research-informed speculative CHI roles

For this workshop, colleagues at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision introduced a series of roles that CHIs play in innovation ecosystems, based on ekip research. These include:

• Cultural anchors: Institutions that provide symbolic and identity-based grounding for communities.
• (Social) connectors: Institutions that act as platforms for participation, dialogue, and mutual learning.
• Economic integrators: Institutions that link heritage to markets and economic flows, managing sustainability and impact through entrepreneurial or hybrid models.
• Experimental spaces: Institutions that create room to test new ideas, methods, or partnerships in protected, flexible, or informal ways.
• Field builders: Institutions that strengthen the broader ecosystem by shaping narratives, building capacity, and cultivating shared standards and knowledge.
• Institutional hackers: Institutions that bend or stretch existing rules to prototype new models, navigate rigid systems, or challenge power dynamics.

A reference sheet featuring further information on these institutional roles is available in the ekip Knowledge Bank https://knowledge-bank.ekipengine.eu/resource/typology-of-roles-for-cultural-heritage-institutions-in-innovation-ecosystems/

Imagining future cultural heritage institutions

Using these roles as inspiration, participants worked in teams to imagine a speculative, fictional CHI that could exist within the next five years. Participants were provided with an organizational canvas to help envision what this future, speculative organization would really be like, and what core innovation role it would play for the communities it serves. Blank worksheets are available in the Knowledge Bank https://knowledge-bank.ekipengine.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Activity-Sheet-Part-1_-Imagining-your-CHI.pdf

Figure 1: Participants filling in the speculative CHI worksheet, using the
three barriers cards and three enablers cards as inspiration.

To help facilitate brainstorming, each participant group was also offered three enablers to innovation and three barriers to innovation, drawn from a card deck developed from ekip research. The card deck will be made available in the ekip Knowledge Bank. The enablers were three resources that would help the speculative CHI thrive, while the barriers were three challenges the CHI needed to overcome.

Using these barriers and enablers, one group imagined an open-air, commons-based speculative museum offering living heritage deeply rooted in community-preserving practices: the ‘Open Speculative Museum’ (OSM ∞.) The second group imagined ‘Food Storey’, a multicultural public resource food library storing and sharing food, recipes, tools, spices, and most importantly, local community stories based in a local coastal community which has a strong seasonal tourist presence.

Back-casting for future feasibility

After creating their CHIs, each group conducted a back-casting exercise imagining what resources, skills, capabilities and roles they would need to find or create to bring their speculative CHI visions to life within the next five years.

Back-casting allows participants to ground their speculative future thinking in the changes that will need to occur to move from the ‘now normal’ to the ‘next normal’: it encourages moving beyond current skills, challenges, and prevailing paradigms into considering what new digital, societal and environmental processes will need to take place to support future visions.

Conclusions

The workshop concluded with a wrap-up exercise asking participants to reflect on one action they would be committing to going forwards from the workshop, one question they were taking away with them, and one connection they had made in the workshop or would be making as a result of the workshop.

Participants’ action commitments included:

• Developing our network to bring a variety of stakeholders into the skills CHI.
• Train speculative archivists and philosophers.
• Reflecting on heritage within a forward-thinking sector as a way of valuing the work that’s done.

Participants’ questions included:

• How can we help funding in the cultural sector to help institutions innovate?
• What policy frames do we need to realize this kind of speculative heritage institution?
• How to truly engage communities in the CHI and in cultural activities in general? How to keep that engagement high?

Participants’ connections included:

• Local community: build it and strengthen cooperation.
• I would like to have a session with my colleagues about how we work together and what role we want in society within our organization.
• Networking with organizations that have strong connections with local communities is pivotal.

Participants found the workshop a useful stimulus for rethinking and expanding definitions of what heritage organizations and cultural professionals can offer to collaborative innovation processes. A full how-to guide for running these Open Innovation Factory workshop activities including all supporting materials are published in the ekip Knowledge Bank https://knowledge-bank.ekipengine.eu/resource/the-innovation-potential-of-heritage-a-workshop-how-to-guide/