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Kelvingrove Museum Innovation Essay

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Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland; a Victorian era museum established in 1901 to express the pride, wealth, and cultural ambitions of the industrial city of Kelvingrove, was in need of change in the late 1980’s to be more relevant to modern audiences. Starting in 1990, when Mark O’Neil joined the Kelvingore Museum, Mark was tasked with bringing innovation to the entire museum by the then director Julian Spalding. After an initial start by O’Neil into implementing some of Spalding’s radical innovative ideas, O’Neil was side tracked into a separate project at the St. Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art. The St. Mungo’s work provided some insight and allowed experimentation with some of the innovative ideas …show more content…

After closing for three years from 2003 to 2006 for the renovations to the building and to fully implement the storytelling approach Kelvingrove Museum has become the most popular touristy destination even surpassing Edinburgh Castle.
What makes something innovative?
In the context of the Kelvingrove Museum innovation the innovations employed took the traditional course of innovations similar to the typewriter, “how an innovation often draws from existing technologies and models for its application but uses these elements creatively in combination with new ones to form a uniquely different product.” (Utterback, 1996, p. 2) O’Neil used this concept at his first museum at Springburn rather than doing the history of locomotive building, for example, the staff created an exhibition on the history of work. “It covered all the important history, but it came right up to date and engaged with unemployment and training and what work meant where so many were unemployed,” (Liedtka & Salzman, 2009, p. 4) O’Neil and his staff at Springburn did not throw out the traditional museum model of locomotive building history but used in packaging together with the current issues of unemployment in the community for a more different but richer museum experience that is relevant to today.
Using the experience from Springburn O’Neil then continued this similar innovative process at Kelvingrove Museum where he applied Spalding’s desire of using

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